RESEARCH ARTICLE
New Perspectives in the Treatment of Tumor Cells by Electromagnetic Radiation at Resonance Frequencies in Cellular Membrane Channels
Emanuele Calabrò1, 5, *, Salvatore Magazù1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 13
First Page: 105
Last Page: 110
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-13-105
DOI: 10.2174/187407070190130105
Article History:
Received Date: 30/04/2019Revision Received Date: 02/07/2019
Acceptance Date: 08/07/2019
Electronic publication date: 30/08/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Background:
The use of electromagnetic fields has been considered as adjuvant therapy for the treatment of cancer given that some clinical trials have shown that the irradiation of cancer cells with electromagnetic fields can slow down the disease progression.
Aims:
We hypothesize that this effect could be amplified by irradiating tumor cells with electromagnetic fields having frequencies close to the natural resonant frequencies of membrane channels in tumor cells, in order to obtain a significant change of the ion flux across tumor cell membrane channels, inducing the largest harmful alteration in their cellular function.
Methods:
Neuronal-like cells were used as a cell model and exposed for 6 h to electromagnetic fields at different frequencies (0, 50 Hz, 900 MHz) at the same intensity of 2 mT. The exposure system was represented by two Helmholtz coils driven by a power amplifier in current mode and an arbitrary function generator. FTIR spectroscopy was used to evaluate the results of the exposure.
Results:
The results of this study showed that the Amide I vibration band increased in intensity with the increase of the frequency, leading us to assume that the displacement of the cell channels α-helices depends on the frequency of the applied electromagnetic fields.
Conclusion:
This preliminary result leads us to plan future research aimed at searching for the natural frequencies of membrane channels in tumor cells using resonant electromagnetic fields in order to damage the cellular functions of tumor cells. Clinical trials are needed to confirm such a hypothesis derived from this physical study.
