Abstract
Tumour-treating fields (TTFields) use alternating electric fields which interfere with dividing cells, thereby reducing tumour growth. Previous reports suggest that electrical forces on cell structure proteins interfered with the chromosome separation during mitosis and induced apoptosis. In the present report we evaluate electromagnetic exposure of cells in telophase/cytokinesis in order to further analyse the mechanism of action on cells. We performed numerical electromagnetic simulations to analyse the field distribution in a cell during different mitotic phases. Based thereon, we developed an electric lumped element model of the mitotic cell. Both the electromagnetic simulation and the lumped element model predict a local increase of the specific absorption rate (SAR) as a measure of the electromagnetically induced power absorption density at the mitotic furrow which may help to explain the anti-proliferative effect. In accordance with other reports, cell culture experiments confirmed that TTFields reduce the proliferation of different glioma cell lines in a field strength- and frequency-dependent manner. Furthermore, we found an additional dependence on the commutation time of the electrical fields. The report gives new insights into TTFields’ anti-proliferative effect on tumours, which could help to improve future TTFields application systems.
Highlights
Tumour-treating fields (TTFields) use alternating electric fields which interfere with dividing cells, thereby reducing tumour growth
Power absorption due to the applied electromagnetic fields is investigated by analysing the specific absorption rate (SAR), which describes the absorbed power density
In the present report we show that TTFields reduce the proliferation of glioma cells (Table 2, Fig. 7) without completely stopping it, which might explain why, applied in clinical studies, TTFields till can not completely stop but only slow tumour growth[13,30]
Summary
Tumour-treating fields (TTFields) use alternating electric fields which interfere with dividing cells, thereby reducing tumour growth. Tumour-treating fields (TTFields) represent a relatively new treatment for various tumours including high grade glioma. Later calculations indicate that a significant impact of TTFields on tubulins and septins is rather unlikely, while dielectrophoretic forces could possibly affect the cellular molecules[21,22]. This shows that to date the exact biophysical mechanisms of TTFields on mitotic cells are not completely understood and more research is necessary in order www.nature.com/scientificreports/. In the present report we used different modelling approaches to precisely evaluate the impact of TTFields on glioma cells and sought to verify the results of the modelling in cell culture experiments. The presented models could be helpful to increase the efficiency of TTFields for tumour treatment by finding optimal TTFields parameters
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