• Magnetic Confinement Fusion
• Matter at the extremes
• Low-Temperature Plasmas
  • Plasma Medicine
    • Plasmas for Cancer Treatment
    • Plasmas for Wound Healing
  • Plasma Manufacturing
  • Thin Films
  • Plasma Propulsion
  • Plasma Diagnostics
  • Modelling and Simulations
  • LTP People
  • Vacancies
  • Services
  • Teaching
  • Public Engagement

Plasma Medicine

Contact: Deborah O'Connell

Cold atmospheric pressure plasmas are emerging as an exciting development for therapeutics. These plasmas are very efficient sources of highly reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (RONS), UV radiation, electromagnetic fields and charged particles. These components have individually been implicated in biological systems and therapeutics. Plasmas have the advantage that they directly generate these and can interact with samples. Examples of applications we work on include cancer treatments, bacterial biofilm inactivation, wound healing and agricultural applications. We use a combination of advanced diagnostic techniques and simulations to determine reactive species concentrations and optimise chemical pathways to develop control strategies for specific applications.

Selected publications: 

Y. Gorbanev, D. Leifert, A. Studer, D. O'Connell and V. Chechik 
Initiating radical reactions with non-thermal  plasmas, Chem Comm, 53 3685 (2017)