Handheld aCAP device eliminates cancer cells with plasma

The advance by a team at UCLA could mitigate against the  complications associated with chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The research was co-led by Richard Wirz, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering; and former UCLA bioengineering professor Zhen Gu, who is now the dean of the College of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Zhejiang University in China. The team’s work is detailed in Science Advances.

Ionised gas, or plasma, is most often experienced as lightning, which is said to have inspired the plasma-generation technique for this new technology. The research team built a handheld, air-fed cold atmospheric plasma – aCAP - device that uses ambient air as its feed gas.

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The patent-pending aCAP device uses tiny plasma arcs that require less than a trillionth of the gigajoule power of a natural atmospheric electrostatic discharge. The system generates near-room-temperature plasma – or cold plasma - with these arcs ionising a jet of ambient air by stripping away some of the electrons from the air molecules. It is safe to touch, feeling like a cool breeze across the skin or static electricity at higher powers.