Investigating use of reactive oxygen species using cold plasma for cancer therapy

Controlled dosage of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species has a wide range of applications in medicine from wound healing to cancer therapy. For certain applications such as in cancer treatment, it is critical to finetune the dosage so that the reactive species can maximize its impact on malignant, cancerous cells while minimizing collateral damage on healthy surrounding cells.

Looking for a way to better adapt the technology for cancer treatment, Jiang et al. investigated the controlled production of reactive oxygen species (ROS) using cold plasma, and identified nanosecond pulsed plasma jet as a promising approach.

“Research on cancer therapy using cold plasma has been ongoing for almost two decades now, although there are still lots of challenges in this field,” says author Chunqi Jiang. “Some biggest challenges include safety and efficacy.”

The researchers used pancreatic cancer cells and breast cancer cells to explore the application of the cold plasma. Their results showed that pancreatic cancer and breast cancer have differing levels of sensitivity to plasma exposure. In particular, they found the results of the plasma treatment on pancreatic cancer cells to be encouraging, as it may be able to kill the malignant cells while avoiding adverse effects on surrounding tissue.

“The ultimate goal here is to modulate ROS production with plasma so that, with appropriate dosage, we can safely and effectively achieve the desired goal or the intended biological effects, either killing or stimulating the cells,” says Jiang.

The team is continuing research on cold plasma applications with more in vitro tests on cancer cells.

Source: “Modulation of ROS in nanosecond-pulsed plasma-activated media for dosage-dependent cancer cell inactivation in vitro,” by C. Jiang, E. B. Sozer, S. Song, N. Lai, P. T. Vernier, and S. Guo, Physics of Plasmas (2020). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0020435 .