Very promising. How soon can this be in actual use? Millions of people need this. Perhaps the FDA can fast-track this.

Goshen Hospital in Indiana has been advertising proton therapy for 3 years now. Northwestern University hospital for about 2 years.

Oh PUULLLEEEZE now! More and better burning from the guys and gals whose only treatment modalities are cut, poison and burn?!?! More people die each year from medical "treatments" than anything else!! Talk about having your priorities out of order!!

Gil Lederman at RSNY has been doing focused beam radiosurgery for >40 years. This is a competitor's blurb, not a breakthrough in my considered opinion. Protons are not inherently more effective. It's the aim, not the caliber of ammo. Good for UP, but atlas should find out about alternatives to allow comparisons with actual patient outcome data, which Dr. Lederman has published.

I love hearing about these kinds of breakthroughs. At 50 I'm at that age when you start worrying about this kind of thing...

And then your face falls off.

This article seems to have a number of misconceptions. As a physicist working in proton radiation therapy, almost certainly protons are not being considered for flash radiation therapy because it wouldn’t work. Protons have to be energy programmed and guided to treat a cancerous area because proton penetration depth is directly related to proton energy. Therefore a spread of proton energies are required with different energy profiles at each internal cancer volume scanned to an accuracy of 1/2 mm. This can not be done by flash methods. Also linear accelerators are currently not able to accelerate protons even close to needed levels by means of linear accelerators. Electrons are accelerated by linear accelerators but such electrons are never used for direct radiation of any human tissues because electrons can not penetrate human skin to any appreciable extent. Electrons so accelerated are used to collide with physical barriers, frequently composed of metals, wherein such collision causes electron deceleration therefore creating X-ray photo emission under Maxwell’s Equations and these intense xrays are used for current boson therapies (I.e. not protons or electrons). So the goal in flash radiation is to reach much, much much higher electron energies in linear accelerators such that X-ray emission is several orders of magnitude greater than today. That is flash radiation therpy. It’s about 3 to 5 years out.

Having recently completed 44 fractions of pencil Proton Beam therapy for contained prostate cancer, and having physically toured & studied each and every piece of equipment in the beam generation, and studying with 5 physicists that built the equipment, and after extensive study & research, I take exception with the premise posited by the researchers & author of this article... Namely, that I understand that the repeated daily fractions of radiation kill cancer cells (which require about 3 days to recover) while allowing healthy cells to survive (which can recover within 24 hours). A single dose overlooks this.

In addition... reducing collateral tissue fibrosis is accomplished by accurate (within 1 millimeter) beam placement... 5 mm inaccuracy increases healthy tissue necrosis and patient death by 50%.

OK, one more comment. I’ve researched this further and the proposed method is very poorly defined. The basic idea has been covered under “hypofraction” for proton therapy, which means delivering many, many doses at one time. This is certainly possible with large ion therpy, I.e. carbon ion therapy. But high dosage protons in themselves is just lacking in further details. The details are everything. Best I can now see they want to deliver total proton treatment, which can take 1 month normally, in 1 second. That’s borderline crazy. So prove it. They are at least 5 years out from doing that and their current explanations do not make scientific sense. So prove it.