Introducing Asia-Pacific Plasma Oncology Network: Progress On Triple Negative Breast Cancer

Here we introduce the Asia-Pacific Plasma Oncology network representing researchers based in Australia, China, USA, Korea, Malaysia and Singapore and welcome other members to join.

Triple negative breast cancers (TNBC), among the many subtypes of such cancers, have the worst prognosis due to lack of surficial marker expression and effective targeted therapy as well as highest aggressiveness and cancer stemness. Plasma activated medium (PAM) was found, from our work, to be more effective in selectively killing TNBCs and was applied in the following three lines of studies.

Part 1: Establishment of computational equation predicting cells’ response to PAM

We designed orthogonal experiments to analyze the effects of various parameters of PAM in treating TNBC cells. Among 7 independent parameters, i.e., cell number (C), treatment time (T), output voltage (U), helium flow rate (F), well size (A), distance from the tail of plasma jet to medium surface (D1), and medium thickness (D2), we identified 4 primary influential factors that collectively determine the efficacy of PAM in treating TNBC.

Part 2: Internal plasma treatment device development and efficacy comparison

Novel plasma needle-like punctuation approach and device were developed for internal animal treatment, using which our in vivo experiments demonstrate the advantages of internal plasma treatment over PAM and surficial treatment.

Part 3: Exploration on mechanisms leading to PAM selectivity in TNBC treatment

PAM was found capable of selectively killing and inhibiting the migration ability of TNBC cells as compared with other BC subtypes. The cell cohort with ALDH over-expression, representing cancer stem cells, was found to be more sensitive to PAM treatment. High throughput sequencing on TNBC and non-TNBC cell lines treated with PAM under different time points revealed a dynamic network integrating data at mRNA, miRNA, lncRNA and circRNA levels. Pathway analyses consolidate our hypothetical network where ALDH1 mediated cancer stem cell signaling is more sensitive to PAM treatment that leads to higher fraction of cell death among cancer stem cells than bulk tumor cells.

Our current network involves more than 20 active faculty members from Australia, China, Korea, USA, Singapore and Malaysia with their researchers and students, and we sincerely thank all of them.