Effects of Plasma Treatment on Wounds

Abstract

Cold plasma treatment of wounds is gaining much interest, because it will offer a non-contact, painless and harmless therapy to manage large-area lesions (burn wounds, chronic ulcerations). One of the important issues in plasma wound healing is the safety of the method. In this work we study in vitro the effects of plasma treatment on cell death, proliferation and wound healing. Many methods have been developed to study the cell viability and proliferation, but one of the most appreciated ones is the MTT Assay. There are many advantages of using this method such as: the method is safe, fast and convenient, and allows simultaneous analysis of many samples (e.g. cell samples prepared in 96 well plates). Viable cells transform the added MTT tetrazolium salt into purple formazan, which is detected by colorimetric methods. The amonut of viable cells is proportional to the amount of formazan. We performed a parametric study of plasmatreated 3T3 fibroblast cells. For the treatment, a cold atmospheric plasma needle (13.56 MHz micro-jet in helium) was used. The influence of plasma on cell viability was measured using the MTT assay. We observed the long-term effects of plasma on cell viability, dependent on the dosage of plasma treatment. Under high doses cell suffered damage that led to decreased viability. Cell death by apoptosis and necrosis was considered.