Cancer’s worst nightmare: CERN’s particle accelerator could end cancer tumors in less than a second
The European particle accelerator may just provide the key to defeating the disease.
A new way of treating cancer via high-velocity blasts of radiotherapy might just be on the horizon, with CERN’s supercollider providing the unexpected source of hope for medical scientists around the world.
If you thought the CERN particle accelerator was merely a 27-kilometre ring of superconducting magnets that accelerated particles to 99.9999991% the speed of light, you’d be partly right: it turns out that it might be much more than that.
Keeping up to date with your regular science mags, you’ll know that the Large Hadron (careful of the potential typo there) Collider causes collisions of sub-atomic particles that scatter of and give boffins in white coats and goggles something to look at. At present it’s the most powerful of its kind on Earth and has been the key machine behind huge discoveries, with the Higgs Boson the outstanding highlight.
And now a new type of cancer treatment, known as Flash radiotherapy, could be set to revolutionise how the disease is tackled - using CERN’s collider as a reference in technology.
Rather than delivering radiation over periods of two to five minutes across dozens of sessions over up to eight weeks, Flash radiotherapy would attack tumours with “an extremely intense dose of radiation in under a second”, as put by Techspot, with the BBC labelling it a “paradigm-shifting approach to traditional radiotherapy treatment.”
This would, it is hoped, kill cancerous cells while doing less damage to surrounding healthy tissue; while the current ways of treating the disease are largely successful, for things like brain tumours in children the effects can be long-lasting.
It is hoped Flash treatment could put an end to this, and the early signs are promising: “animal studies have repeatedly shown that Flash makes it possible to markedly increase the amount of radiation delivered to the body while minimising the impact that it has on surrounding healthy tissue”, wrote journalist David Cox.
Here we see the winding of the GaToroid coil, a new compact non-rotating gantry design for hadron therapy invented at #CERN.
— CERN (@CERN) March 25, 2024
This novel superconducting and lightweight gantry can surround a patient, enabling the treatment of tumours from different angles while eliminating the… pic.twitter.com/0pcgdv9jix
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Techspot adds that “CERN is adapting its particle accelerators – originally designed for smashing atoms – to deliver radiation at ultra-high speeds for cancer treatment", and increasing numbers of human trials are beginning to take place around the world with the new technology.
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