A comparative study of cold atmospheric plasma treatment, chemical versus physical strategy

Abstract

To date, reactive oxygen species and reactive nitrogen species have been regarded as the key factors causing the observable cellular death of cold atmospheric plasma (CAP)-treated cancer cells. The chemical basis of the conventional CAP treatment highlights apoptosis as the main CAP-triggered cell death mechanism. However, we recently demonstrated a strong anti-melanoma effect based on physically-based CAP treatment. In this study, we compared the anti-cancer effect of chemically-based versus physically-based CAP treatment on four typical cancer cell lines in vitro. Three of these cancer cell lines were more sensitive to the physical factors in CAP than the chemical factors in CAP, while the fourth cell line followed the original trend of being more sensitive to chemical factors. This study demonstrated that the physically-based CAP treatment could be an effective anti-cancer approach, which might have a deep impact on the future application of CAP in medicine.

Multi-Modal Biological Destruction by Cold Atmospheric Plasma: Capability and Mechanism

“…Using a novel experimental design, it was found that melanoma cells B16F10 were effectively killed by physical factors mainly the EM effect from a typical CAP jet source [ 20 ]. Similar phenomena have also been observed later during the treatment on glioblastoma cells U87MG, lung cancer cells A549, bladder cancer cells MBT2, MB49, and breast carcinoma cells MDA-MB-231 [ 130 , 131 ]. In these cases, CAP treatment was performed on the bottom of an inverted cell culture dish or a multi-well plate.…”

Anti-Melanoma Capability of Contactless Cold Atmospheric Plasma Treatment

“…Due to the surface tension, there was still a thin layer of medium to cover cells, particularly, at the junction between the wall and bottom of each well. Such an inverted setting for 10-20 min would not cause observable impact on the cell viability [16][17][18]. A single treatment was performed at the well "6D".…”

“…Typically, CAP will generate at least three physical effects: thermal, ultraviolet (UV), and EM. Recently, we have demonstrated that EM effect rather than thermal and UV effects could trigger strong cell death in several cancer cell lines, including glioblastoma cells, lung cancer cells, as well as bladder cancer cells [16][17][18]. Such a physically triggered cell death is obvious necrosis, characterized by a fast cytosol aggregation and noticeable bubbling on the cellular membrane [16][17][18].…”

“…An attractive feature of physically based treatment is that the EM effect in CAP could penetrate a physical barrier such as the bottom of multi-well plates or dishes with a thickness around 1 mm to kill cancer cells [16][17][18]. These physical barriers definitely will block all chemical factors such as long-/short-lived reactive species.…”

On the selective killing of cold atmospheric plasma cancer treatment: Status and beyond

“…The cell death triggered by physical factors is characterized by cytosol aggregation and apparent bubbling on the cytoplasmic membrane, which is a process just lasting about 10 min. [144,145] Because the physically based CAP [140] (b) In situ H 2 O 2 measurement over 3 min Ar plasma jet treatment and 30 min after the treatment. Jurkat T cells and THP-1 cells were human monocytic cell lines, and the cancer cell lines were derived from an acute monocytic leukemia patient, respectively.…”