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June 4, 2010

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Physicists join fight to defeat cancer

PARTICLE physicists and medical scientists are to combine efforts to develop early-detection techniques and advanced treatments for cancer as spin-offs from research into the origins and make-up of the universe.

The CERN European nuclear research organization, home to the world's largest particle collider, said yesterday that the program would explore new ways of fighting cancer by ensuring doctors and physicists work together rather than in isolation.

The program will focus on high-resolution imaging that can spot tumors in their early stages, and the overall effects on the human body of particle therapy for cancer, and other topics, CERN said.

Dubbed "Physics for Health in Europe," the program will ensure researchers from all over the continent meet frequently to exchange ideas and discoveries that could provide avenues to new treatments or to improving existing ones.

Another aim will be to create a European center to supply hospitals and research centers with innovative radio-isotopes.

The plan emerged this year from a workshop which brought 400 physicists, biologists and medical doctors to Geneva to review their areas of research. "Often medical doctors and physicists may not know which aspects of their work will be relevant to one another," Oxford University cancer specialist Gillies McKenna said.

 

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