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Updated: Jul 13, 2025
Basic Research in Plasma Medicine - A Throughput Approach from Liquids to Cells
Published on: November 17, 2017
Decreased inflammatory profile in oral leukoplakia tissue exposed to cold physical plasma ex vivo
Christian Seebauer1, Eric Freund2,3, Tobias Dieke1
1Department of Oral, Maxillofacial, and Plastic Surgery, Greifswald University Medical Center, Greifswald, Germany.
Background:
Oral leukoplakia (OL) is an unfavorable oral disease often resistant to therapy. To this end, cold physical plasma technology was explored as a novel therapeutic agent in an experimental setup.
Methods:
Biopsies with a diameter of 3 mm were obtained from non-diseased and OL tissues. Subsequently, cold atmospheric pressure plasma (CAP) exposure was performed ex vivo in the laboratory. After 20 h of incubation, biopsies were cryo-conserved, and tissue sections were quantified for lymphocyte infiltrates, discriminating between naïve and memory cytotoxic and T-helper cells. In addition, the secretion pattern related to inflammation was investigated in the tissue culture supernatants by quantifying 10 chemokines and cytokines.
Results:
In CAP-treated OL tissue, significantly decreased overall lymphocyte numbers were observed. In addition, reduced levels were observed when discriminating for the T-cell subpopulations but did not reach statistical significance. Moreover, CAP treatment significantly reduced levels of C-X-C motif chemokine 10 (CXCL10) and granulocyte-macrophage colony-stimulating factor in the OL biopsies' supernatants. In idiopathically inflamed tissues, ex vivo CAP exposure reduced T-cells and CXCL10 as well but also led to markedly increased interleukin-1β secretion.
Conclusion:
Our findings suggest CAP to have immuno-modulatory properties, which could be of therapeutic significance in the therapy of OL. Future studies should investigate the efficacy of CAP therapy in vivo in a larger cohort.
