Enhanced Drug Uptake in Normal and Malignant Breast Cell Lines Using Electrical Pulses

摘要

Conventional breast cancer treatments, such as surgery (the Gold Standard), radiation therapy and chemotherapy serve most of the patients while they do not serve all of them. They are expensive and have extensive side effects, both near term and long term. Affordable, alternate treatments are needed to treat aggressive and drug resistant breast cancer tumors. We propose the use of electrical pulses to enhance the therapeutic molecule uptake in breast cancer patients. In order to better understand uptake processes of malignant tissues, it is necessary to investigate uptake in normal tissues as a reference. In this research, we studied the different electroporation characteristics of malignant breast cancer cell lines, MCF-7 and CRl 1743 compared to the non-malignant breast cancer cell lines MCF-10. We applied 200 V/cm, 10-40 ms pulses and studied their effect on viability and other phenomena. Considering that approximately one million incidences of breast cancers are estimated in the world, with ～200,000 in the US and ～320,000 in the Europe, and the rest in the rest of the world, inexpensive, less toxic, existing alternative treatments need to be developed and implemented for clinical practice.