We re working in this collaborative effort with MIT and Harvard because we ve got the technology to do this research and they ve got the patients for the medical research, says Grimes, whose research on neutron measurements was published recently in the journal Nuclear Science and Engineering . But not all treatments are feasible in every situation, Grimes says. Chemotherapy usually causes side effects, surgery isn t always viable and radiation often kills healthy tissue along with the cancerous tumor. Researchers believe boron neutron capture therapy has few side effects. It is similar to traditional radiation but is less likely to destroy healthy tissue near the tumor, Grimes says.
Researchers suspect the therapy is especially effective on small or irregularly shaped tumors.
During radiation, a beam of gamma rays hits a tumor and produces electrons that have a long path length, with electrons often traveling beyond the tumor and into healthy tissue. An electron is a different elementary particle than a neutron, with lighter mass and a negative charge. In neutron therapy, a beam of neutrons is targeted at a tumor that has been injected with the chemical boron, a nonradioactive isotope. The neutrons cause the boron nuclei to split, releasing alpha particles that damage surrounding cells. The path length of alpha particles is the diameter of a few cells, much shorter than the path length of electrons.