FSU physicists make strides in treating cancer
TAMPA - Florida State University launched one of the world’s most advanced nuclear physics departments in 1958, and it has earned global recognition ever since. Now, university researchers are working with the Mayo Clinic to develop improved methods of treating cancer based on work at FSU’s The John D. Fox Superconducting Linear Accelerator Laboratory.
The accelerator is generally designed to study the building blocks of matter. But this work also unexpectedly revealed some extraordinary medical applications.
"Things that nobody thought of when we started doing the research, and we suddenly realized wait, this could be useful for this," said FSU Physics Professor Dr. Paul Cottle.
FSU scientists fire carbon ions that have a negative charge into a large chamber, then shoot up to nine-million volts into a plate in the middle of the chamber.
"And when negative ions see that they are accelerated toward it, they are attracted by it," said lab director Dr. Ingo Wiedenhoever. "Then when they reach the nine-million volts, we play a dirty trick on them. We strip off their electrons, switching the ions’ charge."
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That repels the ions from the high voltage plate in the middle that it had been attracted to and fires it toward the other side of the chamber and toward the second stage accelerator.
The second stage shoots hurtling carbon through super cold tanks of liquid helium and nitrogen. This is where perfectly timed radio waves kick it forward.
"We can get about 20 percent the speed of light with this setup," Dr. Wiedenhoever said.
And from there, they can steer it through a network of pipes to whichever experiment they want to do with it on any given day.
"And there’s about a million dollars worth of germanium crystals surrounding this thing to detect gamma rays," Dr. Cottle noted.
They can track gamma rays, measure the nuclei’s spin, and study the same nuclear reactions that take place inside of stars (some for only a fraction of a second) to learn the complexities of a sun’s cooking process. And along the way, they also discovered their carbon beams can fry a malignant tumor, while doing little damage to the healthy human tissue around it.
"We cannot do therapy. But we can study their interactions of our beams with living cells," Wiedenhoever said.
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They’re now working on this as an alternative to radiation therapy that can harm surrounding tissue.
"If you treat a tumor with carbon ions traveling at 20-30 percent the speed of light, you can actually tune the energy of the carbon ions not to deposit energy around the tumor but only in the tumor," said Cottle. "We’ll be making better cancer treatments because of the experiments they’re doing there."
FSU is currently collaborating with the Mayo Clinic to help it build a dedicated accelerator in Jacksonville that will be the first carbon beam therapy lab on the continent.