INNV-08. COMPARATIVE STUDY OF THE CANCER TREATMENT POTENTIAL EFFECT OF TUMOR-TREATING FIELDS AND COLD ATMOSPHERIC PLASMA
Abstract INTRODUCTION Cold Atmospheric Plasma (CAP) is ionized gas close to room temperature that generates reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, an electromagnetic field (EMF) and UV, which are selectively cytotoxic to cancer cells. Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) is an FDA approved cancer treatment that utilizes “low intensity” and “intermediate frequency” alternating electric fields to produce an inhibitory effect on cancerous cells. OBJECTIVES In this study, we directly compared CAP and TTFields treatments using U87 glioblastoma tumor cells. We aimed to assess the relative merits of both technologies as potential approaches for brain cancer treatment. METHODS In this in vitro study, the cells were treated with either CAP or TTFields at room temperature. In both cases in order the optimize the treatment parameters, the energy we applied was varied for both methods by changing the power and time of the treatment. The resulting cell viability changes were measured 72 hours after treatment. RESULTS The results revealed that increased energy resulted in decreased cell viability of U87 glioblastoma tumor cells with both CAP and TTFields treatment. The rate of U87 glioblastoma tumor cell viability under CAP treatment was 80% of the original viability after using 4.8J of energy, compared with 15,752J of energy with TTFields treatment. Additionally, the CAP displayed significantly greater time-efficiency as compared to TTFields. For instance, the most effective TTFields treatment took 4 hours, while the CAP treatment displayed a comparable effect on tumor cell viability with a treatment time of 30 seconds. CONCLUSIONS This preliminary in vitro study indicates that CAP treatment is potentially a more favorable effective method of brain cancer therapy. This data indicates that CAP is significantly more energy-efficient and requires significantly less treatment time than TTFields. Future research looks to compare the 2 treatments in an intracranial mouse xenograft model.