"There are some tumours that require radiotherapy to the whole brain and whole spinal cord," said Dr Yen-Ching Chang, a specialist in paediatric radiotherapy and lead on proton beam therapy at University College London hospitals, which will have one of the UK's two machines from 2018.
Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), linked in laboratory animals to an increase in tumours of the liver, pancreas and testicles and reduced fertility, is one of the chemicals used in the chain of reactions that makes the common non-stick surface Teflon.
A few studies led by an Italian scientist Gilles-Eric Séralini have reported health risks from GM food and animal feed, notably one in 2012 linking a herbicide-tolerant maize to tumours and early death in rats.
Because the treatment is so highly targeted, it can avoid healthy tissue, particularly tissue and organs behind tumours.
The diet is also viewed by some as a potential way of slowing down the growth of tumours and significantly delaying the onset of Alzheimer's disease.
That makes proton beam therapy really useful for attacking tumours that can be precisely delineated and targeted, to spare other parts of the brain.
Those side-effects are long-term and in brain tumours are mostly neuropsychological.
We know of many people who have had their tumours stop growing or become very indolent as a result of this diet, making these cells vulnerable to other kinds of non-toxic drugs and treatment".
It is, in fact, a neurological alarm system; one that can go wrong for a variety of reasons – shingles, sciatica, spinal cord tumours or lesions, to name a few.
"The evidence of olaparib's benefit in women with BRCA-positive ovarian tumours is very clear," said Prof Paul Workman, chief executive of the Institute of Cancer Research, whose scientists helped develop the drug.
"Its approval underlines the importance of a new generation of cancer drugs targeted at specific molecular features of tumours – drugs which after years of painstaking development are now making their way to patients.
