Damian Green. (Fred Hutch Photo)

When it comes to destroying cancer, Dr. Damian Green doesn’t mess around.

Green is a researcher at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the University of Washington, and his team is developing a way to use radiation to zap cancer cells that don’t respond to normal treatment.

On Tuesday, he was awarded a $3.2 million grant from the National Cancer Institute to test out the cancer-zapping treatment, which could be a life-saving procedure for those with multiple myeloma, a largely incurable cancer.

The grant will fund a clinical trial of the treatment, which begins the process of determining if it is safe and effective enough to be approved for wide-scale use by the FDA.

“If successful, the treatment would provide a unique approach that could benefit the 30,000 people each year diagnosed with multiple myeloma and could potentially be adapted for other cancers,” Green said in a press release.

Multiple myeloma is a tricky disease to treat because, although most patients respond well to treatment, they almost always relapse.

“Therapies knock back the disease but it still returns, often as a consequence of a very small number of remaining tumor cells also known as minimal-residual disease,” Green said.

Those pockets of cells are very difficult to treat with current methods, and today the cancer is largely considered largely incurable.

So Green and other researchers have developed a Rube-Goldberg-esque method for delivering radiation directly to the pockets of cells, an exceedingly tricky process that the research team has been working on for more than 30 years. The process involves creating a “cage” of 10 Boron atoms that contains a high-energy alpha particle, one of the tiny pieces of matter that make up radiation.

The cage is then attached to an antibody, and thousands of those antibodies are injected into a patient. The antibodies hunt down myeloma cells by detecting a biological marker and attach to them. Once the antibody is attached, the alpha particle will move through the Boron cage and radiate the surrounding cells, effectively killing them.

Green and his fellow researchers will spend the next year preparing for the clinical trial, and hope to open it in early 2018.

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