Hadrontherapy: Cancer treatment with proton and carbon beams

Abstract

Sixty years ago accelerator pioneer Robert Wilson published the paper in which he proposed using protons for cancer therapy. The introduction of protontherapy has been very slow, but in the last 10 years the field is booming and five companies offer turn-key centres. Fully stripped ions leave much more energy in the nuclei of the traversed cells than protons of the same range and are thus effective in controlling radio-resistant tumours which cannot be controlled neither with X-rays nor with protons. Paying particular attention to the European contributions, this contribution shortly reviews the history and the developments of carbon ion therapy, a recent chapter of the "hadrontherapy" which covers also radiotherapy with proton and neutron beams. © 2009 Springer Science + Business Media B.V.