Application of Cold Atmospheric Plasma (CAP) in Cancer Therapy: A Review

Background: Recently the use of cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) for the treatment of cancers called “Plasma Oncology” has gained promising results. The developments have raised the hope that this technology could be an interesting new therapeutic approach in the treatment of cancer. Methods: The process of this study includes a narrative review in two stages. At the first stage “literature overview”, all mechanisms of action related to cold atmospheric plasma have been reviewed. To relevant as much as papers for this review, multiple effective techniques have been applied in our search strategy. An extensive search of the published literature has been conducted. Results: Results of this study include three sections as follow: the mechanism of action, in vivo and in vitro findings, and studied focused on selectivity effect of CAP. According to several publications, reactive oxidative species (ROS) can be the major cause of the biological effect of plasma. Several publications concerning in vivo and in vitro studies on different cell lines and selectivity effect showed that there are promising results in favor of anti-cancer effect of CAP. Conclusions: The results of several studies that are summarized within this review show that CAP is effective against cancer which also indicate that CAP seems to be selective for cancer cells compared to non-neoplastic cells. It has been concluded that the feasibility of applying CAP for treating human tissue has already gained momentum although future studies require more studies for clarifying that if CAP is capable to discriminate between normal and malignant cells or not.