New Isotopes for the Treatment of Pancreatic Cancer in Collaboration With CERN: A Mini Review

The use of radioactivity in medicine has been developed over a century. The discovery of radioisotopes and their interactions with living cells and tissue has led to the emergence of new diagnostic and therapeutic modalities. The CERN-MEDICIS infrastructure, recently inaugurated at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), provides a wide range of radioisotopes of interest for diagnosis and treatment in oncology. Our objective is to draw attention to the progress made in nuclear medicine in collaboration with CERN and potential future applications, in particular for the treatment of aggressive tumors such as pancreatic adenocarcinoma, through an extensive review of literature. Fifty seven out of two hundred and ten articles, published between 1997 and 2020, were selected based on relevancy. Meetings were held with a multi-disciplinary team, including specialists in physics, biological engineering, chemistry, oncology and surgery, all actively involved in the CERN-MEDICIS project. In summary, new diagnostic, and therapeutic modalities are emerging for the treatment of pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Targeted radiotherapy or brachytherapy could be combined with existing therapies to improve the quality of life and survival of these patients. Many studies are still in the pre-clinical stage but open new paths for patients with poor prognosis.

Nano-Games for Cultural Venues: the HEAL game

Many are the times when visitors leave an exhibition without a clue about its message. In an effort to eliminate this phenomenon, museums, institutes and organisations (MIOs) adopt more attractive, engaging and fun content to provide a high quality and fast learning experience. Games seem to be an interesting suggestion to this approach but they are time consuming. To this end, we introduce nano-games. We define nano-games as short, easy to master, self–contained games of a single level of difficulty, having basic and direct rules that stay unaltered throughout the play and challenge players with clearly defined goals reachable within tens of seconds of gameplay. This approach has been adopted and evaluated in the premises of European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN).

RADIATION ISSUES IN THE NEW GENERATION OF HIGH ENERGY PHYSICS EXPERIMENTS

With the construction of the Large Hadron Collider at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), the radiation levels at large High Energy Physics (HEP) experiments are significantly increased with respect to past experience. The approach the HEP community is using to ensure radiation tolerance of the electronics installed in these new generation experiments is described. Particular attention is devoted to developments that led to original work: the estimate of the SEU rate in the complex LHC radiation environment and the use of hardness by design techniques to achieve radiation hardness of ASICs in a commercial CMOS technology.