REIDY CENTER'S ANDREI PAKHOMOV FEATURED IN CANCER INSTITUTE ANNUAL REPORT

Andrei Pakhomov, research associate professor at the Frank Reidy Research Center for Bioelectrics, was featured in the National Cancer Institute's latest annual report, which speaks of his expertise in the field of electroporation.

In a chapter of the NCI report, titled "Special Electric Signals Attack Cancer Cells with Lethal Force and Accuracy," Pakhomov is cited as a pioneer in the field of electroporation, where living cells are exposed to extremely short-in-duration, high-voltage pulses of electricity.

"Directing X-ray energy into the body has been a mainstay of cancer therapy since early in the 20th century, but an entirely different approach using electric pulses now shows great promise," the annual report notes. It indicates that the Reidy Center is the first research center in the United States that is dedicated to this burgeoning field, quoting Pakhomov about the potential of electroporation as a disease killer.

"The idea is to deliver electric pulses of extremely short duration through an electrode directly to a tumor," Pakhomov said in the report. If the pulses last only a matter of nanoseconds (a few billionths of a second), they create an electric field that blows open pores in the cellular membrane and disrupts the internal workings of the cell.

Nanosecond electrical pulses are bad news for the cancer cell in many ways, Pakhomov noted. For example, the cellular membrane normally balances electrically charged molecules inside and outside the cell, but when the pores open up, the cell loses control of what's going in and out. This change in the permeability of the membrane leads to osmotic imbalance. Where "ions pour into the cell, followed by water, you get swelling, and more swelling until they eventually explode," he said. "This is a form of necrotic cell death."

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