Development of an Irreversible Electroporation (IRE) Device for Vesicle Ablation

Irreversible Electroporation (IRE) is a tumor/cancer cell ablation technique without generating heat, used micro to millisecond duration pulses with high electric field. It is widely used in medical, biophysics and biotechnology researches. A microcontroller-based IRE device is developed using the locally available resources which produces 800 V/cm electric field pulses with 200 μs pulse width. The device is potentially used for the ablation of a model of cell namely as giant unilamellar vesicle (GUV). The time course of the ablation of GUV has been observed using a phase contrast microscope connected with a highly sensitive charged coupled device camera.