Irreversible electroporation of aggressive triple-negative breast cancer cells

Triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) cells lack estrogen receptor (ER), progesterone receptor (PR) and human epithelial growth factor receptor 2 (HER 2). Most chemo drugs aim any one of these receptors to treat TNBC. Since all the three receptors are lacking, it is very difficult to treat this disease. In addition, due to the nature of these cells, they also are partially insensitive to many chemo drugs. It is of practical interest to treat them with alternative and physical therapies, possibly with no drugs, knowing the extent of damages/side effects caused by the chemo drugs and one potential candidate is irreversible electroporation-use of electrical pulses to ablate the tissue with no drugs. Since no drugs are used and only electrical pulses are involved, it is an attractive alternative for especially those cases, where current standard of cure for cancer, including surgery, chemo, radio, and hormone therapies do not work. In this research, we studied the efficacy of electrical pulses in reducing the proliferation of MDA-MB-231, human, triple negative breast cancer cells using various numbers of pulse intensities and found them to be effective.