Helium atmospheric plasma jet treating breast cancer cells

Cold atmospheric pressure plasmas (CAP) have drawn much interest for biomedical applications in the last decade or so [1]–[3]. One of the most interesting applications is cancer treatment where CAP was used effectively in a wide number of different scenarios and in some cases it even exhibited selectivity in treating cancer while leaving the healthy tissue intact [4]–[6]. In this work a helium (both pure and with 1000 ppm O₂ admixtures) plasma jet is generated in a capillary soda lime glass tube with internal diameter of 3 mm initiated by a 15 kHz, 50% duty cycle, 13 micro sec rise time, and  positive 6.0 kV applied voltage. The plasma is used to treat (for 60s-240s) the cancerous line MCF-7F as shown in Figure 1. The results obtained demonstrate that plasma (He and with O₂ admixtures) can be very effective (reducing viability as determined via flow cytometry) for this cell line.

This project has received funding by the EU Horizon 2020 (MSCA-IF-2015) program under grant agreement 703497.

References

[1]          M. Laroussi, IEEE Trans. Plasma Sci., 43, 703–712 (2015)

[2]          D. B. Graves, Phys. Plasmas, 21, 080901 (2014)

[3]          G. Fridman, G. Friedman, A. Gutsol, A. B. Shekhter, V. N. Vasilets, and A. Fridman, Plasma Process. Polym., 5, 503–533 (2008)

[4]          D. Yan, J. H. Sherman, and M. Keidar, Oncotarget, 8, 15977–15995 (2017)

[5]          D. B. Graves, Plasma Process. Polym., 11, 1120–1127 (2014)

[6]          M. Wang, B. Holmes, X. Cheng, W. Zhu, M. Keidar, and L. G. Zhang, PLoS One, 8, e73741 (2013)