Cold plasma may help treat non-healing wounds: study

Treating cells of the body with cold plasma can regenerate and rejuvenate them, according to a new study that may lead to plasma therapies for patients with non-healing wounds.
Non-healing wounds make it more difficult to provide effective treatment to patients and are therefore a serious problem faced by doctors.
These wounds can be caused by damage to blood vessels in the case of diabetes, failure of the immune system resulting from an HIV infection or cancers, or slow cell division in elderly people.
Researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences and Gamaleya Research Centre of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Russia found that treating cells with cold plasma leads to their regeneration and rejuvenation.

Cold atmospheric-pressure plasma refers to a partially ionised gas (the proportion of charged particles in the gas being close to one per cent) with a temperature below 99,726 degrees Celsius.
Its application in biology and medicine has been made possible by the advent of plasma sources generating jets at 30-40 degrees Celsius.

The results of plasma treatment of patients with non-healing wounds varied from positive to neutral.
Previous work prompted researchers to study the possibility that the effect of plasma treatment on wound healing could depend on application pattern (the interval between applications and the total number of applications).
Two types of cells were used in this study - fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) and keratinocytes (epithelial cells). Both play a central role in wound healing.

The effect of plasma treatment on cells was measured. In fibroblast samples, the number of cells increased by 42.6 per cent after one application and by 32.0 per cent after two applications, as compared to the untreated controls.
While no signs of DNA breaks were detected following plasma application, an accumulation of cells in the active phases of the cell cycle was observed, alongside a prolonged growth phase (30 hours). This means that the effect of plasma could be characterised as regenerative, as opposed to harmful.
The proliferation of cells that had been treated daily over a period of three days was reduced by 29.1 per cent relative to the controls.

The researchers also performed an assay of the senescence-associated beta-galactosidase, an enzyme in a cell which increases with age.
Plasma treatment reduced the content of this substance, which suggests a functional activation of cells - their rejuvenation.
"The positive response to plasma treatment that we observed could be linked to the activation of a natural destructive mechanism called autophagy, which removes damaged organelles from the cell and reactivates cellular metabolic processes," said Elena Petersen, from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).
The study was published in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics.