Degiovanni A Amaldi U 2015 In the last 60 years, hadron therapy has made great advances passing from a stage of pure research to a well-established treatment modality for solid tumours. In this paper the history of hadron therapy accelerators is reviewed, starting from the first cyclotrons used in the thirties for neutron therapy and passing to more modern and flexible machines used nowadays. The technical developments have been accompanied by clinical studies that allowed the selection of the tumours which are more sensitive to this type of radiotherapy. This paper aims at giving a review of the origin and the present status of hadron therapy accelerators, describing the technological basis and the continuous development of this application to medicine of instruments developed for fundamental science. At the end the present challenges are reviewed. https://sonar.ch/global/documents/180812 eng info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/doi/10.1016/j.ejmp.2015.03.002 info:eu-repo/semantics/altIdentifier/pmid/25812487 Physica medica : PM : an international journal devoted to the applications of physics to medicine and biology : official journal of the Italian Association of Biomedical Physics (AIFB). - 2015 Cyclotrons Hadron therapy Linacs Medical accelerators Particle therapy Synchrotrons Elementary Particles History, 20th Century History, 21st Century Humans Laboratories Particle Accelerators Physics Radiotherapy History of hadron therapy accelerators. http://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_6501