Cancer’s worst nightmare: CERN’s particle accelerator could end cancer tumors in less than a second

CERN may be best known for the large Hadron Collider which can accelerate high-energy particles to near the speed of light. That expertise is now being applied to more than the discovery of the Higgs boson, or ‘God Particle’.

Developments at the particle physics research facility located outside Geneva on the border of France and Switzerland have also contributed to several breakthroughs in the medical field. Once such shows promise to help improve radiotherapy treatments, making them highly targeted and able to reach deeper in the patient’s body while at the same time resulting in fewer side-effects.

Treatment that could help cure cancer in a ‘FLASH’

A group of scientists in a 2014 paper confirmed that a new radiotherapy treatment technique they dubbed FLASH was “effective against tumor cells but causes little damage to normal tissue” in mice. Unlike traditional radiotherapy treatments, which deliver lower doses of radiation or particles over several minutes, FLASH delivers a pulsed, ultrahigh dose-rate irradiation over a fraction of a second.

While the tools that cancer specialists use have advanced over the past three decades to make it possible to target an individual tumor with greater precision, traditional treatments can still cause serious, sometime life-threatening, damage to surrounding healthy tissue. One of the researchers on the 2014 study, radiobiologist Marie-Catherine Vozenin, gave the example of treating pediatric brain tumors the BBC.

While they can be cured, the extensive radiotherapy takes a heavy toll on the patient. “The survivors are often left with lifelong anxiety and depression,” she said. Additionally, brain development is affected by the impact of the radiation “causing significant loss of IQ,” Vozenin explained.

FLASH though “could be game-changing,” says Billy Loo, who runs the Flash lab at Stanford University. That’s because a significantly higher dose of radiation can be directed more precisely at the tumor, minimizing the impact on surrounding tissue “without compromising anti-tumor efficacy.” Experiments have shown that mice did not develop typical side-effects that occur after a second round of radiotherapy for brain tumors.

FLASH used to treat human cancer patients

In the decade since, the field of radiobiology has been galvanized and there has been a wave of international research activity that has been leading to studies in human patients in both the US and Europe. However, FLASH therapies require subatomic particles which in turn require extremely complex particle accelerators to create them.

These devices can be the size of a building and cost around $150 million in the case of hadron therapy, one of the most precise forms of radiotherapy, delivered with carbon ions. There are only 14 of these in the entire world. This means that currently only specialists centers can offer these treatments to a small minority of patients.

However, researchers continue to work to find ways to apply FLASH technology to other forms of radiotherapy with the goal of making its use possible in any hospital with radiotherapy equipment.

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