Anti-Matter's Potential in Treating Cancer 216
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.. (Score:5, Funny)
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So how do we administer it? (Score:3, Funny)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:So how do we administer it? (Score:4, Funny)
Although they have to be careful not to damage the surrounding tissue. This means avoiding use of antimuscles, anticonnective tissue, antibones, antilivers, and antibrains.
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Re:Ah yes.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Or the current radition and chemical treatments?
Re:Ah yes.. (Score:5, Informative)
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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.. (Score:5, Funny)
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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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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:brilliant (Score:4, Informative)
Re:brilliant (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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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That's not necessary. The function of tissue_damage(irradiation) only needs to be nonlinear, and preferably start out fairly flat and increase in steepness with increasing irradiation.
Pretty much every effective cancer treatment has fairly nasty side effects. Did you know that the first chemotherapy agents were direct derivatives of mustard gas ?
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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
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Reo-virus may kill 2/3 of all cancers. (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
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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
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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.
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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.
Newfangled, downtown fancy pants hightech. (Score:3, Funny)
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... (Score:3, Funny)
(either that or you need to reverse the polarity of something or other and channel the output through the main sensor grid)
TDz.
I call see the ads now (Score:3, Funny)
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Okay n00b question (Score:2)
Could I hold it?
How do you make it?
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Click here for more info [wikipedia.org]
Re:Okay n00b question (Score:5, Informative)
"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 (Score:5, Informative)
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.)
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Good news everyone! We're off to the other side of the universe to collect positrons!
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No it isn't, not at all. An anti-particle is identical to the corresponding particle, except that certain properties are reversed. For an easy-to-grasp example, the anti-electron has a positive electrical charge, while the anti-proton has a negative electrical charge. (Obviously it's not that simple, and other quantum-mechanical properties are reversed too, such as spin). It would be truer to say that anti-matter is the "mirror reflection" of matter
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Anti-matter in motion (Score:2)
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.)
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Re:Okay n00b question (Score:5, Funny)
It is kind of like negative Mod points. They anialate your Karma.
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And apparently, your spelling too! =)
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Gerry
Overdosing Kills (Score:4, Funny)
Cause: Drug overdose
Location: A little bit over here,little bit over there, and significant portions missing.
Thought Cancer was already Cured (Score:2)
They are going a long ways out of their way to find patentable treatments that are more profitable.
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Where are your charity dollars now?
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Nice conspiracy theory, pity about the holes. (Score:2)
How do you explain clinical trials that utilize drugs whose patents have already expired? Such as this chemo regimen [wikipedia.org], 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 Aga
No, theyre just spending billions on lobbying.. (Score:2)
Somewhere in a parallel universe... (Score:5, Funny)
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Hope commerical use reduces costs.. (Score:2)
Atomic physicists? (Score:2)
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.
Misleading photo (Score:2)
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Some particles will hit stuff inside the target (depending on density, thickness, atomic makeup and such) and be scattered/absorbed, some will hit nothing and emerge at the other end.
Antimatter Enema (Score:3, Funny)
First the Web Server, Now antimatter POC (Score:2)
why it makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
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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Well, no, not really. Electrons deposit energy like you described. Indirectly ionizing radiation, such as high energy gamma radiation have an effect called "build-up", which makes it deposit its maximum amount of energy at a depth. 20 MV bremss
Startling revelation! (Score:2)
I Cured Cancer! (Score:4, Funny)
They are NOT using Anti-matter (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
spend it on research instead (Score:2)
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 accelerato
do the numbers... that's well worth it (Score:2)
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.
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You forgot the costs to actually run the thing.
not really (Score:2)
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 th
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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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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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25 Billion per gram = 25 bucks per nanogram (Score:3, Interesting)
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What ever gave you that idea? A positron has the same charge as a proton, but much smaller and only 1/1836 the mass of the proton. It would be quite a challenge to get the same kinetic energy from positrons.
The positrons in PET co
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You don't need to - the whole point is that the positrons are going to be annihilate themselves & some of the electrons in the target cell, and therefore you need les
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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
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A milligram of antimatter would "cure" everyone in the whole city, of whatever ails them.
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Close enough (Score:2)
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
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How many of those compounds are 100% guaranteed to completely disappear the instant they're done poisoning the target cells?
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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
Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:no poisons or radiation is required to cure can (Score:2)
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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
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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 grea
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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 lo
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$10K per patient is not a lot of money.
The UK government has paid up to 48,000GBP [bbc.co.uk] ($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.
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Yes, but based on my extensive study of results published in the peer-reviewed medical journals of Marvel and DC, a large percentage of those 2000 patients would not only be cured but would develop uncanny superpowers. If only one of those patients then goes on to prevent terrorists from a fictional-but-re
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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