Sanjana Kshetri

Electroporation is novel delivery system and Electrochemotherapy(ECT) is a novel treatment which consists of a combination of a chemotherapeutic agent and pulsed electric fields. Two types of Electroporation are reversible and irreversible Electroporation. This is relatively new treatment modality relies on the physical effects of locally applied electric fields to temporarily destabilize cell membranes in the presence of a drug to allow increased uptake of the agent into the cytosol. Clinical trial data suggests that irreversible electroporation may become an important and innovative tool in the armamentarium of surgeons treating cancer. Electrochemotherapy has been used effectively in preclinical and clinical studies. The therapy was shown to be effective regardless of histologic type of tumor including head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Considering the proven safety in several different clinical applications electroporation should be viewed as a clinical platform technology with wide perspectives for use in ECT, gene therapy and DNA vaccination. In this review we gathered the data of the clinical trials that have been published so far.