Bochum 2015 – scientific programme

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K: Fachverband Kurzzeitphysik

K 5: Poster

K 5.3: Poster

Tuesday, March 3, 2015, 16:30–18:30, Foyer Audimax

Dielectric Investigation of Normal and Malignant Cells Exposed to Nanosecond Pulsed Electric Field — •Jie Zhuang, Anna Steuer, and Juergen F. Kolb — Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology, Greifswald, Germany

Nanosecond pulsed electric field (nsPEF) has shown its unique potential as a non-thermal tumor ablation method. A number of studies have confirmed that nsPEF can induce apoptosis of many types of cancer cells. However little is known about the responses of normal cells when exposed to apoptosis-inducing nsPEFs. For in vivo applications, this is a crucial question to answer. It is generally believed that normal and cancer cells exhibit very different dielectric characteristics which initiate different nsPEF-cell interactions and lead to different cell fate. To the best of our knowledge, this topic has not been thoroughly explored. In this study, the responses of a normal rat liver epithelial cell line (WB-F344) and its malignant counterpart (WB-ras) to nsPEFs were investigated by means of dielectric spectroscopy. Preliminary results show that normal and cancer cells exhibit significantly different dielectric characteristics. Using a well established tissue model (cell monolayer), we found that the long-term (24 hours) influence of nsPEFs on the dielectric properties of normal cells is significantly weaker than on cancer cells, suggesting normal cells recover faster from nsPEF-exposures.