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Anti-Matter's Potential in Treating Cancer
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is taking a look at how atomic physicists are developing cancer treatments. A step past radiotherapy, the CERN institute is publishing interesting results: 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' The press release from last year is finally sparking interest in the medical community."
Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.
There are a lot of things that kill cancer cells. It's finding the things that kill exclusively cancer cells that's the hard part.
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Sounds too newfangled and high tech for me.
I'd prefer it if they used they did what they did back in my great-great-grandfather's time: the Shotgun Method
The doctor/vet/farmboy would place the muzzle of the shotgun to the tumour and blast it out. Sure, there's some peripheral damage and blood loss but it's tried and true. Sucks if you use it to treat testicular cancer, but a light 410 load of birdshot, some frozen peas and you'd be back on your feet in 8 months.
That you need Dilithium crystals and a Scottish engineer to make it work effectively. ...or am I mixing up TV with reality again? :-)
(either that or you need to reverse the polarity of something or other and channel the output through the main sensor grid)
TDz.
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Warp speed cancer treatment!
Fire the micro-Photon torpedos!
Can someone please explain what Anti-matter actually is? Is it matter just misnamed and slightly different? Is it the absence of matter?
Could I hold it?
How do you make it?
Is anyone else turned off by the idea of putting material in your body that will literally annihilate parts of you?
Like what booze is doing to my liver?
Trolling is a art,
Unfortunately, Anti-matter is currently the most expensive substance on the planet. At best it can be manufactured for $25 Billion per gram. I suggest they spend their time on a more practical solution to the cancer problem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter_weapon
They might as well say aether can also cure cancer. It would probably be cheaper to discover/create.
People already get bombarded by radiation to kill tumor cells -- this isn't that much different, except that the damage to the tumor is more direct and probably at a higher concentration than with ordinary bursts of radiation. You get the twin effect of the anti-particles annihilating their particle counterparts and the secondary radiation (mainly gamma) given off by that annihilation.
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exactly what big pharma needs to increase their already record profits!
at 45 billion per pill this cancer "cure" will be flying off the shelves!
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Didn't they already cure cancer with dichloroacetate? http://www.wanderings.net/notebook/Main/CheapSafeD rugKillsMostCancers/
They are going a long ways out of their way to find patentable treatments that are more profitable.
Well, considering that the current crop of particle-beam based cancer treatments being developed is using a stream of protons. If the kinetic impact of high-speed protons is a high enough energy level, than a stream of positrons would do the trick nicely... and considering that PET is already used in medicine, I doubt the increase in the amount of positrons needed would be (that big of a) cost factor. (At least not compared to the cost of the actual trials.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
...antimatter beings have just discovered that cancer may be treatable with particles of ordinary matter.
of manufacturing antimatter.. cause there's only one thing more simple to build than a rocket engine, and that's an antimatter rocket engine. The potential for space technology is enormous.. if only antimatter didn't cost so damn much.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Personally, I'd be more turned off by the idea of a growth of runaway cells taking over my body and killing me. If I had it, I'd happily let them dump a bit of antimatter in me, rather than DIE.
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Doctor: "Nurse, please fix me up a syringe full of antimatter!"
Nurse: "Sure thing doc." Goes into store room. Clattering sound...
Doctor: "Now where the hell did she go!"
Engineering is the art of compromise.
We'll just take a plasma welder to the affected area. Aside from being relatively quick, it's also cost-effective.
I just read Slashdot for the articles.
Atomic physicists work on electron structure of atoms -- not on subatomic particles. You'd think being a techie site that Slashdot wouldn't get its science wrong so often; but it seems the fucktard editors always let the side down.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
You might try actually reading the article before spouting off. No, wait, this is Slashdot. What was I thinking?
The photo shown in the article is that of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) which will (when operational) circulate two beams of protons at 7 TeV. The total energy in the beam is 360MJ so I really doubt that you will want to use that to cure a brain tumour....although if you did I suppose it would be the first time where particle physics literally made someone's head explode!
Colon cancer victims are going to give the command "jettison the warp core" a new meaning...
Kilotonnes of TNT, to be precise.
e = mc^2, m = 2g (it reacts to an equal amount of matter), c=299792458 m/s
e = 179751035747363.528 kg*m^2/s^2 = 179.751 TJ
1 kT TNT = 4.184 TJ
179.751 / 4.184 = 42.96 littul kittons.
For comparison, Little Boy, which was dropped over Hiroshima was around 11-13 kT TNT equivalent. Yes, antimatter is potent stuff, but for effect of small doses, I'd rather go with tryptamines myself.
Regards,
--
*Art
Antimatter is stored in a vacuum where there is no normal matter.
According to the article, the higher selectivity was one of the advantages over traditional proton irradiation (I suspect because you could use lower energy particles but the article is light on details and I'm just guessing). That said, I worked at CERN for a few years, and I certainly wouldn't put it past people there to aggrandize some experiment to bring in more funds. But this happens in every research field, even medicine. CERN, the birthplace of the web, also has a department of industry liaison which is responsible for selling spin-off technologies to companies, to get some return on the publics investment.
But they're parts of you that have already turned traitor and are trying to kill you. So trust me, you won't feel too guilty about it. If nothing else, it'll serve as a stern warning to all those other cells that they damn well better keep their DNA in line.
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How do you explain clinical trials that utilize drugs whose patents have already expired? Such as this chemo regimen, which was in clinical trials just in the past couple of years despite several of the drugs being unpatentable. (I don't think they're giving out any new patents for prednisone and mustard gas these days.)
Sorry to interrupt. Back to your regularly scheduled Raging Against The Big Bad Pharmaceutical Machine.
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We broadly classify reactions into chemical and nuclear.....there's nothing official about the term "sub-atomic" reactions. Anyway.... scientists have created "Anti-Hydrogen".....although I'm not aware of any other antimatter nuclei
Tough times don't last... Tought People last forever....
You mean like this...
If only treatments like these were ready in 2005... My wife of 20 years was diagnosed with a brain tumor (GBM) Thanksgiving 2005 and died in January 13, 2006. Nothing is special any more...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
WTF? Tell that to the late Dr. Atkins. Hell, there are plenty of books out there now specifically about treating cancer through diet (though most are responsible enough to view it as a supplement to rather than replacement for traditional therapies), and they sell. If your dad had any actual proof, trust me, he'd be a rich man.
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What we get then is actually a great example of an "exotic atom" - the two mirror particles form an unstable "atom" called positronium which is extremely short-lived and which decays into two photons going at 180 degrees to each other. This is important because that is the only way you can detect such an annihilation taking place. At any rate, my point is that this is hardly a "high-energy" application as so many science hacks have sneeringly pointed out here so far. Radiology is an established field of medicine and one reason it is so is because radioisotopes can be made so damn selective (tracers anyone? :P).
My understanding [which I admit is limited and may actually be completely lacking :-)] is that the anti-matter particles annihilate contacting matter when at (or close to) rest.
The idea for use in medical treatment is to propel anti-matter at such velocity so as to pass harmlessly through the body and to come to rest within the tumor, thus annihilating matter at that point.
Was I even close? (Be nice, I tried.)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Is there anything Cern can't do?
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
...bullets. Also, is it really a surprise that you can kill cancer by obliterating it with antimatter? It's not made of special cancer baryons.
How many of those compounds are 100% guaranteed to completely disappear the instant they're done poisoning the target cells?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The real problem isn't toxicity, it is selectivity. How do you kill cancer cells without killing the entire organism?
And if you'd read the article, you'd understand that that's exactly the advantage of antiprotons.
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You are dead wrong. Cancer is really caused by subluxations in the spine, restricting the flow of the body's energies. The cure, of course, is a series simple manual adjustments that allow the body's energies to properly flow and cure the disease. It's as simple as that. Your nutritionist quackery is an obvious attempt to make money while ignoring that has been known all along by chiropractors!
The
Didn't read the article, did you?
b) Same way you do with current proton beam treatments. Shoot a beam of them at the cancer. Make it several beams, that converge on the tumor.
c) No, actually it works quite well. Radiotherapy is very common. Anti-protons are just another type.
d) No more than any other type of radiotherapy. Actually, less so. That's the point of the article.
a) is your only real point, but only the first word. Antimatter is hard to store, so you can't ship it around like you can with long half life radio-pharmaceuticals. The equipment to make it is really big, so you can't just manufacture the stuff right in the hospital like you can with short half-llife radio-pharmaceuticals. The only option is to bring the patients to the accelerator.
First off, heavy ion beams make sense as a way of treating cancer. The reason is that when a heavy ion passes through matter, it decelerates along a straight-line path, and deposits a very large percentage of its energy near the very end of its path. If you compare with x-rays as a radiation treatment, x-rays deposit energy in an exponential-decay pattern, so if you're treating a brain tumor with a pencil beam of x-rays, the tissue that gets hit with the most radiation is the skin, followed by the skull, followed by the good parts of the brain, followed by the tumor. Now in reality you don't use a pencil beam, you use a focused beam, so it's not quite that bad, but focusing also works with heavy ion beams (I believe you actually rotate the patient, not the beam). So with heavy ion beams, you get energy concentrated near the tumor for two different reasons: (a) focusing, and (b) the pattern of energy loss, which is peaked at the end of the trajectory.
OK, now about antimatter. An amazing number of posters apparently (a) haven't read the article, (b) haven't understood the article, or (c) don't know enough physics to make heads or tails of any of this.
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a) Read the article. b) Read the article. c) Read the article. d) Read the article.
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This reminds me of how Lawrence discovered how to use his newly built cyclotron to treat his mother's cancer, and thus created the field of radiation therapy.
Long story short.....
He sat her down in a chair in front of the cyclotron he had just finished building and placed her knee in front of the exit end.
I read this in a book somewhere a long, long time ago, and think I might have my facts mixed up, but I'm pretty sure that's how it went.
Kinda funny ho some of the most advanced medical procedures has such amazingly simple beginnings.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I have come to realize that every new technology can be (and will be) applied toward the cure for cancer.
Hopefull they don't mix metric with atomic mass units.
You can cure cancer by listening to the radio? What station?
$10K per patient is not a lot of money.
The UK government has paid up to 48,000GBP ($92K) to save someone for a "year" (as they count it -- quality of life measures etc). According to that article 20,000GP ($38K) is easy to justify for giving someone a year more life. So if you can actually cure a patient -- meaning they live considerably longer -- it's worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least.
And that's before private health cover.
It turns out, blowing up and irradiating cells kills them! And you thought science didn't accomplish anything.
Yes, antimatter is unstable and hard to stock, so that's the big problem with that technique, treated people will have to go to a particule accelerator to be treated instead of a normal hospital.
Yes, antimatter can kill any kind of cell, but there are funny things about that kind of physics that basically says that if you throw the antimatter with the right energy, it will require x cm of flesh to slow it down enough before it can react with regular matter. So if you configure the system correctly, the great majority of the antimatter will explode at a very localized point and generate radiations that will be almost totally absorbed by a small volume of flesh (inj the order of cubic millimeters), so there is a very good spacial selectivity with that kind of technique.
And to be honest, I'm not very worried about a terrorist group trying to steal or smuggle a particule accelerator wheighting millions of tons and putting GW in it to get picograms of antimatter.
It just dawned on me: the solution to curing cancer is to cross it with anti-cancer!
Table-ized A.I.
no, you are wrong. Cancer is caused being born at the wrong time. This page proves my point.
The only tricky part is, before treating patients with brain conditions, we'd have to make sure that none of them had taken damage to the crucial Not Being An Evil Genius portions of the brain. We wouldn't want a situation where the very same incident that creates a hero also happens to create his villainous arch enemy.
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
Now, there's 'being a jerk' or submitting some daft comments under the protection of the AC account and there's just being unnecessarily offensive. Everyone is entitled to be a jerk sometimes, but most retain a degree of respect and maturity when they do it. Shame on you.
AT&ROFLMAO
to prevent you buying cheaper canadian versions, to prevent people in developing nations who are incapable of paying from being able to save their lives.. don't defend the corrupt just because they do a little good.. remember al capone ran soup kitchens too.
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Try posting on a non AC account next time. Oh that's right, you are a coward so you won't.
I *almost* hope *you* suffer a terrible loss, but two wrongs don't make a right.
People like you are good for society in a way though. You're a doctoral dissertation waiting to happen for some lucky psychology major.
Disclaimer: Physicist.
E=mc^2, anyone? Anti-matter would be impossible to use here.
The misconception arises in that the methods used to create anti-matter (i.e. particle accelerators) are being employed in order to treat cancer. Think of it more as a particle beam treatment. Instead of using X-rays, they are using ion-beams to target the cancer. This reduces collateral damage by orders of magnitude and so is an extremely good alternative to Chemotherapy. NB: It is not a cure; at least not at this stage. There is more news to come next week from the same people, btw... good news!
Please can someone change the article to correct that anti-matter is not being used.
Radiation treatment for cancer is a desperate measure, something doctors do because they don't really know how to treat the actual cancer.
At $200-$300 million (!) per particle accelerator, capable of treating about 2000 patients per year, it seems doubtful to me that this is actually worth it.
Successes in non-radiation cancer treatments shows that through studying cancers and the underlying mechanisms, researchers can come up with targeted, rational treatments. Every single one of those particle accelerators translates into a cancer research lab. In the long run, far more patients are likely going to be cured if we spend money on cancer research and making it attractive for people to choose careers in biomedical research, rather than particle accelerators.
...and hit your face. I hope you didn't really need that.
Thanks for pointing that out, but I don't believe it for one second. Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter. I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity. You can already narrow the exposure radius with standard chemotherapy. And with radioisotopic dyes, you can target to specific areas in the body (ex: thyroid). Yet another means to generate radiation that kills cells does nothing to advance the selectivity that has already been achieved.
There is some truth in Dan Browns books, but he does make a lot of mistakes. They can be quite irritating to me when I'm reading his books.
Yes, antimatter + matter equates to boom.
In the book, Dan Brown states that a gram of antimatter meeting matter would result in a boom was 20 kiloton, the equivalent of the atom bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
In explosions, a kiloton refers to the explosive release energy of an explosing of a kiloton of TNT, which is 4.2 x 10^12 joule. If you calculte E=mc^2, you'll find that a gram of matter (or antimatter) has the potential to release 90 terajoule, which is 21.4 kiloton. So Dan Brown was about right, you would think.
Actually, he wasn't. When a gram of antimatter meets matter, both the gram of antimatter and the gram of matter annihilate. So the explosive release of energy is twice as large: 42.8 kiloton.
Radiation is radiation. Matter is matter.
So alpha radiation would be
I know what the article says, but unless they have developed some sort of magical anti-matter beam, this does not solve the problem of selectivity.
It does, to some degree. Different types of radiation have different energy distribution characteristics when they hit the body. Alpha particles pretty much deposit all of their energy within the first few millimeters of tissue (maybe even less), Xrays drop off exponentially and/or are scattered by bones, and some types of particle radiation deliver most of the energy at a point that is a few cm inside the body. Antimatter radiation is one such type.
If you can make sure that the tumor you want to kill is precisely those few cm inside the body, you can kill it fairly selectively without depositing too much energy in healthy tissue.
http://www.yog-sothoth.com/modules.php?name=Review s&rop=showcontent&id=24
Check it out, Baby's First Cthulhu.
200000000 dollars divided by (2000 patients per year times 20 years of operation) equals 5000 dollars per patient!
Considering only the vast positive economic impact of getting a cancer sufferer out of hospital where they're costing money and into the labour pool where they're making it a cancer treatment would be worth it at a much higher price.
I quit!
Dammit, sorry. Thought you were replying to the GP, not the parent.
God, the lines that
Thank you slashdot, for setting the bar so low: your sacrifice elevates the status of all other websites.
'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with anti-matter subatomic particles, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.' AWESOME!! finally my anti matter death ray is being used for Good...Gliven!
"Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius." -Heinlein
No, sorry, that calculation doesn't work. There are plenty of similar cancer treatments available. The question is what number of patients per year have a meaningfully better outcome because of this treatment compared to existing, much cheaper treatments, and that number is likely to be small.
More importantly, the $300m that this costs is gone once it's spent: it treats a fixed number of patients, nothing more. In contrast, if you spend the same $300m on research, you generate knowledge and treatments that will benefit patients indefinitely.
Probably more importantly, you can gain any net energy this way. Whatever energy would be liberated by annihilating the anti-matter would be less than or equal to the energy required to create it. It could be an energy storage mechanism, but it's not an energy source (unlike getting oil that already exists out of the ground).
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
here is what must have happened:
a scientists went to a bar and got drunk
the scientist asked the bartender "what would be the best way to cure cancer?"
and the bartender said "doing something that would make cancer suddenly not be there."
and thus the answer presented itself: everyone knows,
nothing is better at making things suddenly not be there than anti-matter
-proidiot
Yea, my mother died of the same thing last year (she went into surgery a year ago yesterday). Those sorts of treatments are years away at best, and even if they're exceptionally effective, they still may not be set up for killing an aggressive fast spreading cancer like a Glioblastoma Multiforme...Right now those are pretty much universally fatal.
Anyway, it's always easy to say, "Well they should have rushed this thing forward" but the truth of it is, they've cured a lot of types of cancer...in mice. Making the jump to people is not going as well.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Didn't the Klingons have a disruptor weapon based on this technology?
No such seting as stun... it just destroyed cellular structure with
antimatter radiation.
True, but if you ever want a proper spaceship that can do more than just take off and drift, antimatter would be handy.
Gah! Can't! You can't gain any net energy this way.
That'll teaching me to post just as I'm running out the door.
"You call it a new way of thinking; I call it regression to ignorance!" -- Operation Ivy
There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION.
;)
That's far too blanket of a statement. Studies show that low-level ionizing radiation either has no effect or lowers mortality.
Maybe not pertinent to this article, but I had to respond to that blanket statement WITH ALL THE CAPS
I know the feeling, my father was diagnosed with bone marrow cancer in 2003, died after a long fight with it thanksgiving day 2006. I used to follow such research carefully.
Now..only thing I think of is atleast, others wont lose their loved ones. if only it was soon enough for me.
I agree, most people are willing to pay $10k to not die. People will do anything to save their lives. However, once the hospitals and the HMO's and all of the bureaucracy gets its part of the pie, the $10k treatment is really more like $40k or $50k. Modern hospital healthcare is wildly inefficient. Granted, you would pay that $40k or $50k to save your own life if you had it, but are you interested in increasing your health insurance payments a couple of percent so that a few thousand people can get less harmful cancer treatment? Most business owners aren't interested in having higher insurance payments. Bean counters aren't going to go for this until the price comes down and it becomes more universally useful.
So how do you wait for the antimatter "know" what to anti? Is it clever enough to eat up a tumor and not eat up the nurse that goes to fetch it?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
And even if he has no interest in making money off of the suffering, if he had an interest in saving as many lives as possible you'd think he would do what is necessary to support his theories and spread the word.
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