Early history of development of boron neutron capture therapy of tumors

The stable isotope 10B has a peculiarly marked avidity to capture slow neutrons whereupon it disintegrates into a lithium and a helium atom. These give up the 2.4 MeV of disintegration energy which they share within 5 and 9 microns of the 10B atom respectively. This means that the cell closest to the 10B atom bears the brunt of its atomic explosion. The objective of the tumor therapist is to find a carrier molecule for the boron atom which will concentrate in the tumor. Although a number of investigators saw the peculiar advantage of this selective tactic to achieve destruction of a species of unwanted cells, no success in animal studies was achieved until 1950. Sweet and colleagues found that the capillary blood-brain barrier keeps many substances out of the normal brain but that the gliomas had much less of such a barrier. He, Brownell, Soloway and Hatanaka in Boston together with Farr. Godwin, Robertson, Stickley. Konikowski and others at the Brookhaven. National Laboratory worked partially in collaboration and partly independently. We irradiated at 3 nuclear reactors several series of glioma patients with no long-term remission, much less a cure being achieved. Hatanaka on his return to Japan kept BNCT alive by treating a total of 140 patients with various brain tumors. Beginning in 1972, Mishima and colleagues have achieved useful concentrations of 10B-borono-phenylalanine, an analogue of the melanin precursor tyrosine, for BNCT of melanomas.