Study of a Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma jet device for indirect treatment of Squamous Cell Carcinoma

Purpose

The possibility of obtaining plasmas at low temperatures and atmospheric conditions, the Cold Atmospheric Plasmas (CAPs), has triggered several studies on its possible medical applications. The use of CAPs devices applied to oncological treatments is still in a pre-clinical stage, but early investigations have shown promising results, both in vitro and in vivo. In this work, is reported the study of a custom made Cold Atmospheric Pressure Plasma jet device for indirect treatment of Squamous Cell Carcinoma.

Methods

The plasma plume produced by the jet device was characterized by optical emission spectroscopy and the vulnerability of two different cell lines, SCC-15 (Squamous Cell Carcinoma) and HGF-1 (non-cancer cell line) to different working parameters factors such as the volume of medium used on indirect plasma treatments, the number of cells used in the biological assays and the volume of treated medium in contact with the cultured cells were systematically tested and studied.

Results

The effectiveness of CAPs’ treatments is time, volume and cell dependent. Cancer cells, specifically SCC-15 cells have shown to be more sensitive to indirect plasma treatments than the non-cancer cell line used in the present work.

Conclusions

According to the obtained results, this study showed that thein vitro anti-cancer capacity of the developed jet plasma device will be higher when small volumes of medium are used together with moderate plasma treatment times, keeping the non-cancerous cells almost unaffected.