PriME · Starting Grant

Efficient anticancer immune effects are a prime medical discovery of this century. Molecular alarms drive such immune responses, signaling priming and effector cells to action. Several approaches are studied or clinically used to initiate or support such action. Yet, the perhaps evolutionary old and most conserved mechanism has been mostly off the map so far: reactive oxygen species (Physical-technical applications extend into medicine for diagnostics and also therapies, such as: cancer treatment. Tumor cells present various receptors on the cell surface, and immune cells can interact with these receptors to decide whether a cell should be eliminated or not. Therapies or other external influences can change the spectrum of the presented receptors and thus the interaction, aiming to stimulate an immune response. Once a tumor cell gets identified as harmful, an immune response is initiated to recruit cytotoxic T cells and other adaptive immune cells to reduce tumor growth. Physical plasmas are therapeutic and have antimicrobial efficacy and cancer-killing effects. Plasmas can be generated to operate at low temperatures, which enables them for medical applications, and produced reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS) mainly induce biomedical effects. In tumor cells, plasma treatment leads to redox stress, followed by altered surface marker expression, which has immune-stimulating properties. However, ROS are not absent when the tumor cell dies, and further ROS-mediated mechanisms, such as oxidation of released biomolecules, continue. I hypothesize that immune-stimulatory properties of plasma are combinatory effects of molecular changes and biomolecule oxidation, suggesting that a standardized plasma treatment with maximized ROS, more precisely radical production, optimizes biomolecule oxidation and immunological consequences. My vision is to establish a novel approach to plasma-treated cancers by oxidizing cancer lysates with plasma for use as a therapeutic vaccine.