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Killing Cancer with Cold Plasma

Adam Hirst, Matthew Simms, Vincent Mann, Norman Maitland, Deborah O’Connell and Fiona Frame.

• 25 September 2015
  5pm-5.20pm

• York Medical Society (map)

• FREE admission
  No booking required

• Wheelchair accessible

  (through garden)

Event details

In much the same fashion that heating a liquid turns it into gas, applying a lot of energy across a gas will transform it into plasma: the ‘fourth state of matter’. Plasmas form a very complex, chemically reactive environment, which is known to have effects on cells. This has led to current thinking that plasmas may find uses in biomedicine, and in particular, cancer treatment.

We have shown in our work that treating cells, grown from donated prostate cancer tissue, with low temperature plasma leads to high levels of DNA damage and rapid cell death. We have also found that very few cells survive the treatment and recover to re-grow. We believe that plasma treatment may be a promising future alternative treatment to radiotherapy and surgery for men with prostate cancer.

http://www.york.ac.uk/physics/research/plasma-physics/ltp/

http://www.york.ac.uk/biology/units/cru/‌

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