Condello Maria, D'Avack Gloria, Spugnini Enrico Pierluigi, Meschini Stefania
National Center for Drug Research and Evaluation, National Institute of Health, 00161 Rome, Italy.
Biopulse S.r.l, 00144 Rome, Italy.
Cancers (Basel). 2022 Sep 5;14(17):4341. doi: 10.3390/cancers14174341.
Electrochemotherapy (ECT) is one of the innovative strategies to overcome the multi drug resistance (MDR) that often occurs in cancer. Resistance to anticancer drugs results from a variety of factors, such as genetic or epigenetic changes, an up-regulated outflow of drugs, and various cellular and molecular mechanisms. This technology combines the administration of chemotherapy with the application of electrical pulses, with waveforms capable of increasing drug uptake in a non-toxic and well tolerated mechanical system. ECT is used as a first-line adjuvant therapy in veterinary oncology, where it improves the efficacy of many chemotherapeutic agents by increasing their uptake into cancer cells. The chemotherapeutic agents that have been enhanced by this technique are bleomycin, cisplatin, mitomycin C, and 5-fluorouracil. After their use, a better localized control of the neoplasm has been observed. In humans, the use of ECT was initially limited to local palliative therapy for cutaneous metastases of melanoma, but phase I/II studies are currently ongoing for several histotypes of cancer, with promising results. In this review, we described the preclinical and clinical use of ECT on drug-resistant solid tumors, such as head and neck squamous cell carcinoma, breast cancer, gynecological cancer and, finally, colorectal cancer.
电化学疗法（ECT）是克服癌症中经常出现的多药耐药性（MDR）的创新策略之一。对抗癌药物的耐药性由多种因素导致，如基因或表观遗传变化、药物流出上调以及各种细胞和分子机制。该技术将化疗给药与电脉冲应用相结合，其波形能够在无毒且耐受性良好的机械系统中增加药物摄取。ECT在兽医肿瘤学中用作一线辅助疗法，通过增加许多化疗药物进入癌细胞的摄取量来提高其疗效。通过该技术增强疗效的化疗药物有博来霉素、顺铂、丝裂霉素C和5-氟尿嘧啶。使用这些药物后，已观察到对肿瘤有更好的局部控制。在人类中，ECT最初仅限于用于黑色素瘤皮肤转移的局部姑息治疗，但目前针对几种癌症组织学类型的I/II期研究正在进行，结果令人鼓舞。在本综述中，我们描述了ECT在耐药实体瘤如头颈部鳞状细胞癌、乳腺癌、妇科癌症以及最后结直肠癌中的临床前和临床应用。
