Blood Cancer Cell Electroporation at Virginia Tech

[Guest guest]

Hi all, Did someone post already about the electroporation of cancer cells in vitro at Virginia Tech? “A team of biomedical engineers at Virginia Tech and the University of California at Berkeley has developed a new minimally invasive method of treating cancer, and they anticipate clinical trials on individuals with prostate cancer will begin soon.” *** http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/531205/?sc=dwhp*** There was a strange synchronicity with that. Before Christmas, I ordered the $800 Beck device package from SOTA Instruments but didn’t use it yet, since there were too many dinners going on and I was afraid of using it because of garlic in the food. But when I returned to work, a colleague of mine from UNR showed me an article that he received from the Nevada Cancer Research Center. It was the above link and also a PDF document from the journal ‘Integrative Biology’ Volume 2, Number 2-3, March 2010, pages 113-120, with the title: ‘Microfluidic electroporation of tumor and blood cells: observation of nucleus expansion and implications on selective analysis and purging of circulating tumor cells’, by Ning Bao (ad), Thuc T. Le (, Ji-Xin Cheng (b)and Chang Luz (abc), (a) Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, Purdue University, 225 S. University Street, West Lafayette,Indiana 47907, USA. E-mail: changlu@...; Fax: +1 765-496-1115; Tel: +1 765-494-1188, ( Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, Purdue University, 225 S. University Street, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA, © School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, 225 S. University Street, West Lafayette, Indiana 47907, USA, (d) School of Public Health, Institute of Analytical Chemistry for Life Science, Nantong University, Nantong, China. The bottom line was “With duration of 100–300 ms, we found that the thresholds for electroporation-induced lysis started at 300–400 V/cm for M109, 400–500 V/cm for white blood cells and 1100–1200 V cm for red blood cells.” M109 is a cancer cell culture that they used. The article also shows pictures of the damaged cancer cells due to electroporation. The abstract can be read here: *** http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20473389*** With best regards, Stephan