An In Vitro Study on Adjuvant Enhanced Irreversible Electroporation

Recently, irreversible electroporation (IRE) has emerged as a promising tumor ablation technique. IRE induces cell death by irreversibly compromising membrane integrity with a series of short, high voltage electrical pulses [1]. IRE offers many advantages over surgery and thermal ablations including that it 1) is fast and minimally invasive, 2) destroys the tumor while preserving adjacent connective tissues [2], and 3) can be delivered with negligible thermal injury [3]. Here we hypothesize that the thresholds necessary to successfully electroporate cancer cell membranes, and therefore more effectively destroy an entire tumor, can be dramatically improved by careful choice of 1) electroporation parameter, and 2) chemical adjuvants that specifically impact the cell membrane.