I generally don't trust cancer-communication if it's juiced up like this incredible headline. There has been huge amounts of progress. We don't need silicon valley idiots starting to make proclamations. It's doing fine without your mediocrity.
Hey, FLASH finally hit Hacker News! I remember my professors talking about this in graduate school. It's a fairly well-established effect: the tumor selectivity of radiation is much better at ultra-high dose rates. It is still unclear exactly why. But there are a lot of studies about it:
> Currently, the most plausible theory emerging from her team’s research points to metabolism: Healthy and cancerous cells may process reactive oxygen species—unstable oxygen-containing molecules generated during radiation—in very different ways.
The sidebar mentions heavier particles having a pronounced Bragg Peak[0] and also existing approaches like multi-beam targeting. The FLASH effect in the article is yet another tool to limit the surrounding damage.
The major issue isn't the speed of delivery, and the cancer.
The key question is how do you spare normal tissue, and how do you prove the normal tissue is spared in the long term. Current answer is: You break it apart into multiple sessions, the anti-thesis of FLASH.
It saddens me with a survivor in my family that the primary therapies are still cut, burn, and poison. They are horrific to experience and just slightly better than the disease.
There are so many biological cures on the horizon; they can't arrive fast enough.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 42.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41571-022-00697-z
Reminds me of this which I (think) was linked here a while ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/s12276-020-0384-2
It really does feel like all these piecemeal cancer treatments are converging on something resembling a cure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bragg_peak
The key question is how do you spare normal tissue, and how do you prove the normal tissue is spared in the long term. Current answer is: You break it apart into multiple sessions, the anti-thesis of FLASH.
Source: my wife is a radiation oncologist.
There are so many biological cures on the horizon; they can't arrive fast enough.