Plasma, Cancer, Immunity

Publication date: February 2018 Source:Clinical Plasma Medicine, Volume 9, Supplement Author(s): Sander Bekeschus, Thomas von Woedtke, Klaus-Dieter Weltmann, Hans-Robert Metelmann Incidence and prevalence of most types of cancers are continuously rising. Oncological research progresses as well, with many new drugs and treatment modalities launched in the last years. Cold physical plasma is a promising new technology for oncology, and already applied in many cancer models successfully. First tumor patients benefited from plasma therapy in the palliative setting. While superficial tumors provide an excellent treatment target for repetitive plasma treatment, tumors within the bodies are much are harder to reach. Plasma treatment can be envisioned during radical surgery to treat wound margins often harboring micrometastasis but plasma intervention may be limited to a single application in such setting. Moreover, diffuse metastatic spread throughout the entire body is unlikely to be reached with plasmas at all. A conceptual paradigm from the field of immunology is that cancer cells are visible to the immune system. They are seen as “foreign” because of mutated proteins and therefore peptide sequences presented on major histocompatibility complexes on the cell surface presented to T cells, which in turn aid in killing cancer cells. However, tumor cells evolve to hide their immunogenic potential. This can be retrieved by immunogenic cancer cell death (ICD) induced with, e....
Source: Clinical Plasma Medicine - Category: Research Source Type: research