Delivery of Genes In Vivo Using Pulsed Electric Fields

Abstract

The first research that focused on the effects of pulsed electric fields on living cells described the phenomena of reversible and irreversible membrane breakdown in an in vitro environment in the 1960s and 1970s (1-6). This early research led to the current understanding that exposing cells to intense electric fields induces a transmembrane potential that is superposed on the resting potential. Induced potentials of sufficient magnitude cause a dielectric breakdown of the membrane. This physical phenomenon was termed electroporation, or electropermeabilization, because it was observed that molecules that do not normally pass through the membrane gain intracellular access after the cells were treated with electric fields.

The Feasibility of a Smart Surgical Probe for Verification of IRE Treatments Using Electrical Impedance Spectroscopy

“…), the phenomenon can be either reversible, which is useful for cell transfection, or irreversible, which results in cell death [6]. Therefore, EP gave birth to three treatment modalities: electrochemotherapy (ECT) [7,8], electro-gene therapy (EGT) [9,10], and irreversible electroporation (IRE) [11,12].…”

Antitumor Efficacy of Irreversible Electroporation and Doxorubicin-Loaded Polymeric Micelles

“…To our best knowledge, this manuscript presented the first example to combine IRE with activatable chemodrug-loaded nanoparticles with acute treatment efficacy. Unlike thermal ablation, IRE selectively disrupts cell membranes and enables the intracellular delivery of nanoparticles 21 . As shown in Figure 3, more cell nuclei expressed the fluorescence of Dox after IRE or RE.…”

The Effect of Millisecond Pulsed Electric Fields (msPEF) on Intracellular Drug Transport with Negatively Charged Large Nanocarriers Made of Solid Lipid Nanoparticles (SLN): In Vitro Study

“…The electropermeabilization technology can be effectively applied in transport of molecules, such as chemotherapeutics in electrochemotherapy (Mir et al 1992 , 2003 , 2014 ; Sersa et al 1998 , 2008 , 2009 ; Heller et al 2002 ; Čemažar et al 1998a , 1998b ; Kulbacka et al 2014 ; Saczko et al 2014 ; Vasquez et al 2014 ; Campana et al 2014 ; Yarmush et al 2014 ; Cadossi et al 2014 ; Miklavcic et al 2014 ) or nucleic acids in gene therapy (Jaroszeski et al 1995 , 1999 , 2000 , 2004 ; Heller et al 1996 , 2001 , 2005 , 2010 ; Ugen and Heller 2003 ; Gillbert et al 2002 ; Aihara et al 1998 ; Miyazaki and Aihara 2002 ; Rols et al 1998 ; Gibot and Rols 2015 ; Faurie et al 2003 ; Orio et al 2013 ; Forde et al 2014 ; Emr et al 2014 ; Kalli et al 2014 ; Gehl 2014 ; Takei 2014 ; Hu and Li 2014 ). In the case of electrochemotherapy, electropores appearing in the cell membrane after application of the electric field enable transport of small non-lipophilic drug molecules into the cell.…”