Let’s get physical: atomic medicine

Have you ever wondered what connects the Large Hadron Collider to cancer treatment? In this talk I will describe how accelerators developed for particle physics are used for treating cancer with proton beam therapy. Along the way I will talk about how we use beams of radiation to treat cancer effectively and why the machines needed for proton beam therapy are so large and complex, along with a sneak peak at the NHS’ new proton beam therapy facilities.

In each of our cells, gates filled with whirly spaghetti protect the storage room – the nucleus – that contains our DNA. This spaghetti has very peculiar properties: It acts like a sieve that prevents caster sugar from entering the nucleus, but that lets rice grains pass if they have the right flavour. Most dangerously, some of these rice grains are viruses, such as hepatitis B virus and HIV. Physics has powerful tools to describe the behaviour of whirly spaghetti, and indeed recent research indicates that these tools can help us to understand how viruses find their way into the cell nucleus.