PREFACE

This book provides a unique and comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art understanding of the molecular and nanoscale processes that play important roles in ion-beam cancer therapy. It covers experimental design and methodology, and reviews the theoretical understanding of the processes involved. It offers the reader an opportunity to learn from a coherent approach about the physics, chemistry and biology relevant to ion-beam cancer therapy, a growing field of important medical application worldwide. The book describes phenomena occurring on different time, spatial and energy scales relevant to the radiation damage of biological targets and ion-beam cancer therapy from the molecular (nano) scale up to the macroscopic level. It illustrates how ion-beam therapy offers the possibility of excellent dose localization for treatment of malignant tumours, minimizing radiation damage in normal tissue whilst maximizing cell-killing within the tumour, offering a significant development in cancer therapy. The full potential of such therapy can only be realized through the understanding of the physical, chemical and biological mechanisms, on a range of time and space scales that lead to cell death under ion irradiation. This book describes how the recently developed multiscale approach, unifying all the experimental and theoretical expertise available in the field, leads to greater insight at the nanoscopic and molecular level into radiation damage of biological targets induced by ion impact. The book is intended for the master and Ph.D. students and specialists in the areas of physics, chemistry, biology and medicine related to ion-beam therapy, radiation protection, biophysics, radiation nanophysics and chemistry, atomic and molecular physics, condensed matter physics, and the physics of interaction of charged particles with matter. The most important features and benefits of the book are in the systematic description of the inclusive multiscale approach for the description of complex and highly interdisciplinary processes behind the ion-beam cancer therapy and its key components. This theoretical approach, being stretched from the atomistic level up to the biological scale, is demonstrated to be in the excellent agreement with experimental observations. Ion-beam cancer therapy (IBCT, or hadron therapy) represents an effective method for providing high-dose delivery into tumours, thereby maximizing the probability of killing the cancer cells whilst simultaneously minimizing the