Nanosecond, low voltage electro-endocrine-therapy for breast cancer treatment

Electroporation is the technique of applying high intensity, short duration pulses for effective drug/gene delivery for cancer therapies when conventional treatments do not work and/or costly with serious side effects and for chemo-resistive patients. Typically micro and millisecond pulses have been used by several researchers. Use of nanosecond pulse is gaining momentum due to its various advantages including cytoplasmic delivery of molecules. For this purpose, several kV/cm (10–30kV/cm), 10–300ns pulses have been used by previous researchers. Considering that it is always good to use as low a voltage as possible for patient treatments, we studied the efficacy of 20ns pulses at low electric field intensities of 200V/cm, 500V/cm, and 1200V/cm on MCF-7 breast cancer cells using Tamoxifen, the hormone drug for estrogen receptor positive cancer tumors. These pulses were applied for durations of a few minutes and their viabilities were studied at various Tamoxifen doses. Results indicate that higher doses and longer duration pulses are also effective in killing the cancer cells, indicating that nanosecond, low voltage electro-endocrine-therapy is a viable treatment for breast cancer patients.