Geneva, 29 feb (EFE).-the current challenge scientists to improve cancer treatments is to build small accelerators of particles to produce beams of protons that kill cancer cells more efficiently than radiotherapy.
The director of the Centre European physics of particles (CERN), Rolf-Dieter Heuer, today at the International Conference on research in Radiology Oncology to be held this week in Geneva explained that the goal of the scientists is “know what needs the medicine and then see what develops”.
Recent years cancer treatments employing x-ray have been replaced in some hospitals – very few by the high cost of this technology – by others using beams of protons, the same type of particles used in collisions in the great accelerator of Collider (LHC) of the CERN.
These Proton beams become a scalpel much more precise and effective than x-rays, but they have drawbacks, because upon entering the body the route of radiation from these particles affects both cancer cells and healthy ones.
Therefore, CERN is trying to develop new treatments using antiprotons, to minimize the effect of radiation on the unaffected cells.
If these treatments are public for a clinical use against cancer, the first application will take at least one decade.
“Important thing now is build more small and inexpensive accelerators so that each hospital can have them in a treatment room.” “We can produce the protons, but are not going to devote ourselves to generate these particles for hospitals,” he added.
Also, CERN director defended the work of this laboratory in fundamental research and recalled some of the experiments have a medical approach, although he added that this type of research not can become “a centre of medical research”.
Furthermore, the Professor of Oncology at the University of Wisconsin, Soren Bentzen, who is also participating in the Conference, regretted that many of the medications used to treat cancer are “too expensive”, so sometimes the patients do not receive the most appropriate treatment.
Bentzen said that a research to produce a drug of this type can cost about $ 1 billion, at the time advocated a customization of the treatment of cancer.
“Have many more parameters that a few years ago to describe each tumor.” You would “be defined many more subtypes of tumors for a more personalized treatment that are currently”, he concluded. EFE
