European Developments in Radiotherapy with Beams of Large Radiobiological Effectiveness

This paper reviews the European activities in the field of tumour therapy with beams which have a Radio Biological Effectiveness (RBE) larger than 1. Initially neutron beams have been used. Then charged pions promised better cure rates so that their use was pursued in the framework of the ‘Piotron’ project at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Switzerland). However both approaches did not meet the expectations and in the 80s the EULIMA project became the flagship of these attempts to improve the effects of the delivery of radiation doses of large RBE with respect to photons, electrons and even protons. The EULIMA ion accelerator was never built and it took more than ten years to see the approval, in Heidelberg and Pavia, of the construction of the HIT and CNAO ‘dual’ centres for carbon ions and protons. In 2008 they will start treating patients. The developments that brought to these construction projects are described together with the special features of these two facilities. The third European dual centre is being built by Siemens Medical Systems in Marburg, Germany, while other facilities have been approved but not yet fully financed in Wiener Neustadt (Austria), Lyon (France) and Uppsala (Sweden). Finally the collaboration activities of the European Network ENLIGHT are presented together with the recent involvements of European industries in the construction of turn-key dual centres and the development of a new accelerator concept for hadrontherapy, the ‘cyclinac’.