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."

Ah yes..

[ravenshrike (808508)]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

Re:

[by Anonymous Coward]

It is if you're a robot who wants to get high. Think about it. It would probably work.

Re:Ah yes..

[tomhudson (43916)]

WEll, they originally thought it would be a huge money-maker by using antimatter to clean teeth - eveyone wants a big white smile. However, trials proved that "tooth is stronger than fiction."

Re:Ah yes..

[captnitro (160231)]

You mean, tooth is stronger than fission.

Re:Ah yes..

[TeknoHog (164938)]

At least good old brushing works, since tooth is stronger than friction.

So how do we administer it?

[EmbeddedJanitor (597831)]

Antimatter sucks up anything it touches.

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!"

Re:So how do we administer it?

[MadnessASAP (1052274)]

I believe what you're thinking about black holes Antimatter annihilates anything it touches along with itself in a 1:1 ratio releasing E=MC^2 amount of energy. PS I guess that makes using antimatter to remove a 1 lb tumor the equivalent of setting off a nuke then?

Re:So how do we administer it?

[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

They introduce the antitumor and it annihilates the tumor.

Although they have to be careful not to damage the surrounding tissue. This means avoiding use of antimuscles, anticonnective tissue, antibones, antilivers, and antibrains.

Re:

[miyako (632510)]

for most people, shouldn't it be "...antibones, antilivers, brains"?

Re:Ah yes..

[profplump (309017)]

As opposed to cancer?

Or the current radition and chemical treatments?

Re:Ah yes..

[speleo (61031)]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

It is. Already being done: Positron emission tomography [wikipedia.org].

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[stam66 (633108)]

Non-specific refers to the fact that to get to cancer cells (assuming you can localise them) you have to get through normal tissue, often a lot of it.

If it were simply a matter of "aim a particle beam" while adjusting other properties, it would have been done decades ago. Current non-anti-matter-particle beams or EM radiation are more than potent to kill cancer cells. Unfortunately it is equally deadly to normal tissues, which restricts it's current use. Radiotherapy in various forms has been around for a

Re:Ah yes..

[jesdynf (42915)]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

Yeah, having to reboot all your nanobots is so much worse than dying of cancer. The terrible spectre of EMP is a little less scary when you're already gonna die.

While I'm on the subject, though, cut them some slack. They're using antimatter. Antimatter! As medicine. Antimatter as medicine! This is the most awesome thing I've read this year. I thought nitroglycerin was cool, but this -- what's next? Using Great Old Ones to soothe colicky babies?

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[AdamThor (995520)]

Because setting off miniature broad-spectrum emp blasts inside your body it a GOOD thing.

For thoses worried about potential health effectses of anti-matter, I likes to present my own alternative research: The Hammer's Potential in Treating the Cancer.

Scientists say 'Cancer cells were successfully targeted with a hammer, causing intense biological damage leading to cell death.'

It works like this - you stands very still, and I hits you in the cancer with hammer.

brilliant

[Lord Ender (156273)]

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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[MisterCookie (991581)]

You mean my acid bath treatment isn't a good idea?

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[MillionthMonkey (240664)]

You think you're surprised? I've been spraying myself with positrons every morning for the past five years to look younger!

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[Flodis (998453)]

You think you're surprised? I've been spraying myself with positrons every morning for the past five years to look younger!

You should've used tachyons.

Re:brilliant

[zebadee (551743)]

Thats kind of the purpose of the article, if you read it. They compare using charged particle beams to traditional radiotherapy treatment and comment that using particle beams allows the raditation to be better focused on the tumour (in this case a spinal tumour), leading to less death of surrounding tissue.

Re:brilliant

[jd (1658)]

What's wrong with a gamma knife? (Uses eight sources, none of which are exceptionally dangerous in themselves, such that the area of overlap is totally lethal.)

For that matter, since cancer cells tend to generate heat, the cancerous region should be nearer the point of cell death than non-cancerous tissue. Use microwaves to raise the water temperature such that healthy cells will still be below the threshold but cancer cells are cooked.

Alternatively, cancer cells must pull in far more amino acids than healthy cells simply to duplicate so rapidly. Synthesize some amino acids that use an isotope you know the frequency for a-la x-ray fluorescence. Beam in some x-rays at the required frequency. The isotope will absorb them and emit electrons. Because the cancerous cells have more of the isotope, they will have more electrons blasting around. I would have thought you could do some really nasty things to the cancer before the healthy cells even noticed the extra charge on their bill.

Re:brilliant

[imsabbel (611519)]

gamma knife= bad at best, horrible in practice. There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION. Splitting it in 8 beams only increases the amount of affected tissue. The only reason its in use is that its marginally better than dying.

Bragg-peak of decellerating particles== huge dosage in a very tiny volume, relatively little interaction of the particles during the inition part of ther journey through the body.

And, as i post this right now from beamline 8.0 of the Advanced Light Source in berkeley, i can tell you that biological molecules have nice brought absorption spectra, and while there might by sharp pi-resonances, those are smeared out a lot in liquid solutions (plus, the carbon edge is really crowded, there is no empty space to "design a molecule" to.

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[hondo77 (324058)]

gamma knife= bad at best, horrible in practice. There IS NO SAFE LEVEL FOR IONIZING RADIATION. Splitting it in 8 beams only increases the amount of affected tissue. The only reason its in use is that its marginally better than dying.

As someone whose wife went under the gamma knife, I have to tell you that you are full of shit...at best. She went under in the morning to zap a brain tumor and I took her home that afternoon (or was it the next morning?--I forget which). The tumor was completely destroyed

Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers.

[fahrbot-bot (874524)]

It's finding the things that kill exclusively cancer cells that's the hard part.

You mean like this...

Reo-virus [abheritage.ca], or respiratory enteric orphan virus, is naturally occurring and believed to cause mild infections of the upper respiratory and gastro-intestinal tract in humans. However, in testing mice with implanted human cancer tumours, Lee and his team of researchers were able to show that reo-virus also has the ability to selectively kill a wide variety of cancer cells.

...Lee's findings have indicated that approximately two thirds of cancers cells bear an active Ras pathway and the remaining cells can be treated with a particular chemical to deactivate their anti-bodies against viruses.

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...

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[SatanicPuppy (611928)]

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

Re:

[dreamchaser (49529)]

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.

Newfangled, downtown fancy pants hightech.

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

But my complete understanding of physics says...

[thomasdz (178114)]

That you need Dilithium crystals and a Scottish engineer to make it work effectively.
(either that or you need to reverse the polarity of something or other and channel the output through the main sensor grid) ...or am I mixing up TV with reality again? :-)

TDz.

I call see the ads now

[edwardpickman (965122)]

Warp speed cancer treatment!

Okay n00b question

[Frogbert (589961)]

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?

Re:

[TheRealMindChild (743925)]

Antimatter is... just as it sounds. The opposite of matter.

Click here for more info [wikipedia.org]

Re:Okay n00b question

[radtea (464814)]

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.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Planesdragon (210349)]

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.)

Re:Okay n00b question

[HBI (604924)]

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 [wikipedia.org] is helpful.

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[Mr. Bad Example (31092)]

> [antimatter is] A complete set of mirror image subatomic particles.
 
...each with a tiny, tiny goatee.

Re:Okay n00b question

[Tablizer (95088)]

Can someone please explain what Anti-matter actually is?

It is kind of like negative Mod points. They anialate your Karma.
       

Re:

[flyingfsck (986395)]

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.

Overdosing Kills

[Dr. Eggman (932300)]

Time of Death: 2:30pm

Cause: Drug overdose

Location: A little bit over here,little bit over there, and significant portions missing.

Somewhere in a parallel universe...

[Waffle Iron (339739)]

...antimatter beings have just discovered that cancer may be treatable with particles of ordinary matter.

Antimatter Enema

[hirschma (187820)]

Colon cancer victims are going to give the command "jettison the warp core" a new meaning...

why it makes sense

[bcrowell (177657)]

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.

1. Antimatter is the same as matter except that it has the opposite charge.
2. No, you don't have to handle samples of it. They make antiprotons in a particle accelerator, and in the experiment, they delivered it to a sample of hamster cells suspended in gelatin. You'd just put the patient in the beam of the accelerator. This has already been done with beams of protons on real patients. There's absolutely no difference, in principle, between delivering a beam of protons to the tumor and delivering a beam of antiprotons.
3. Yes, antimatter is the most expensive stuff ever made. No, that isn't particularly relevant, because you're not feeding it to the patient in gram quantities.
4. At present, there is no dedicated medical facility where patients could get exposed to a beam of antiprotons, and there may never be. What you'd have to do, for the foreseeable future, is bring your patient to a particle acclerator, get him some beam time, and place him on the receiving end of the beam. Although beam time is incredibly expensive, it's not necessarily true that you'd have to pay for 1 hour of beam time in order to give the patient 1 hour of treatment. There may be times when the accelerator is being tested, and the beam would otherwise just be wasted. There may be times when someone is doing an experiment with 1 femtoamp of antiprotons, but they can spare 0.01 femtoamps of their beam to be diverted to the patient. Or there may be times when it's just not possible to book 100% of the available beam time for physics experiments (e.g., something goes wrong with an experiment, and they can't use the rest of their beamtime).
5. The reason a beam of antiprotons is four times more effective than a beam of protons is that after the antiproton delivers a bunch of energy through electrical interactions with electrons, it then annihilates itself with one of the protons in a nucleus in the tumor. This is such an energetic process that I imagine every single proton and neutron in that nucleus goes zipping off separately, with energies in the MeV range. These neutrons and protons then deposit their energy in the tumor as well.

I Cured Cancer!

[Tablizer (95088)]

It just dawned on me: the solution to curing cancer is to cross it with anti-cancer!

They are NOT using Anti-matter

[styryx (952942)]

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.

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[grub (11606)]

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?

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[Billosaur (927319)]

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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[yotto (590067)]

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.

25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram

[Chmcginn (201645)]

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 [wikipedia.org] 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.)

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[ceoyoyo (59147)]

In PET you don't inject positrons. It's positron EMISSION tomography. You inject a substance that, when it decays, emits positrons, then they quickly run into an electron and annihilate, producing two gamma rays, which you detect.

These story is about using anti-protons (very different than positrons) and they're using a beam (well, more than one beam for an actual treatment) of reasonably slow ones. As stated in the article, there are really only a couple of places in the world that can produce such a be

Re:

[Eric Smith (4379)]

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.

Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can

[porcupine8 (816071)]

But of course there is no money to be made by telling people all they have to do is follow the proper diet

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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[thrawn_aj (1073100)]

the research is completely bogus..... antimatter is a very unstable substance that cannot survive in our universe, because it combines with matter and both annihilate each other... for example an electron and a positron on combining mutually annihilate & produce photons.... In this regard anti matter can kill normal cells too with equal efficacy. Since there is no selectivity in this, it is as good or bad as radio therapy.. another thing, antimatter can be produced thru nuclear reactions only...so you can worry about things like nuclear laws, terrorists etc.

The blanket statements I have read so far are contrary to the facts. Surely you folks have heard of PET scans (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PET_scan [wikipedia.org]), a quite ordinary procedure these days? Well, PET stands for positron emission tomography, a really cool mapping technique which is based on low doses of a radioisotope that's chemically incorporated into a sugar being injected into the body. Based on the sugar properties (these can presumably be tailored to the purpose at hand), it then concentrates in areas