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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!
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,
A complete set of mirror image subatomic particles. The antimatter analogue to the electron is the positron, etc.
No you can't hold it. It annihilates matter when it comes into contact with it, releasing a burst of energy.
Theoretically the Big Bang created equal amounts of matter and antimatter, but we're wondering where the antimatter is...maybe whole galaxies are composed of it? There's no way to tell from the light - photons are the same whether generated by matter or antimatter.
Short of that, small amounts are created in particle accelerators and in the upper atmosphere, I believe.
As usual, Wikipedia is helpful.
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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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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.
Can someone please explain what Anti-matter actually is?
It is kind of like negative Mod points. They anialate your Karma.
Table-ized A.I.
Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.
"Matter" in ordinary parlance has various important properties: solidity, resistance to motion (otherwise known as mass) and so on.
Anti-matter has every single one of these properties, so it is not particularly helpful to say it is "the opposite of matter" because it is not.
Anti-matter is simply matter that consists of anti-particles, as correctly indicated by the article you link. Anti-particles are just like ordinary particles except that they have the opposite charge, parity or magnetic moment (in the case of neutrons). This minor change results in a fairly large cross-section for mutual annihilation when an anti-particle scatters off of its corresponding particle.
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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.
Wrong.
No, that's what he said.
Your failure to grasp his words does not invalidate them, it merely illuminates your own poor understanding of the topic.
Let's put it another way: if there was an anti-sun with an anti-solar system, exactly like Earth but with every particle the inverse of our Earth, they would be exactly the same. (Even when they eventually met and obliterated each other -- matter blows up antimatter just as well as antimatter blows up matter.)
Colon cancer victims are going to give the command "jettison the warp core" a new meaning...
That's for production and storage. Production and immediate use (irradiating an object such as a patient) doesn't involve that much operational expense. The big expense is the capital equipment outlay, which has to be amortized over a very large number of treatments.
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).
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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> [antimatter is] A complete set of mirror image subatomic particles.
...each with a tiny, tiny goatee.
Get a copy of Prof Hawkins' "A brief History of Time". He explains it all really well and there is only one formula in the book.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
It just dawned on me: the solution to curing cancer is to cross it with anti-cancer!
Table-ized A.I.
Think of matter as a politician and antimatter as truth. A politician cannot hold truth without being totally annihilated in a orgasm of Klieg lights and profuse sweating.
Gerry
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.
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.
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