Combination of tumor therapeutics and cold plasma to fight cancer

During the last decade a new interdisciplinary field of research has been established: Plasma Medicine is combining the plasma physics with molecular biology and microbiology in order to uncover the cellular effects of cold atmospheric pressure plasmas on microorganisms and eukaryotic cells. The cell based effects range from a treatment time dependent induction of programmed cell death to stimulation and activation of cells and tissues. Especially due to the fact that cold plasmas are able to induce apoptosis, the focus on cancer treatment emerged in the recent years. However, only few studies have been performed with cancer cells and non-malignant cells in parallel in order to compare the efficacy of cold plasma. Here we present data on a combined treatment of cultured tumor cells and non-malignant cells with cold plasma and common anti-tumor agents used in state of the art cancer treatments. The results show that plasma alone is able to induce cell death in cancer cells predominantly over healthy cells. Thereby the certified plasma source kinpenMed was used to directly and indirectly apply argon plasma, which was able to induce apoptosis in a time dependent manner. By the addition of radical scavengers we could show that not only long-living reactive species are responsible for cell death. In addition we can show that the combination of antitumor therapeutics such as doxorubicine or gemcitabine with cold plasma is even more effective in killing cancer cells than the anti-cancer drugs alone. Especially the fact that the dosage of those anti-tumor agents could be reduced when combined with cold plasma is of tremendous importance with respect to the clinical applications and the side effects of tumor therapeutics.