electrochemotherapy

Electrochemotherapy (ECT) is a type of chemotherapy that allows delivery of non-permeant drugs to the cell interior. It is based on the local application of short and intense electric pulses that transiently permeabilize the cell membrane, thus allowing transport of molecules otherwise not permitted by the membrane. Applications for treatment of cutaneous and subcutaneous tumors have reached clinical use by utilizing drugs such as bleomycin or cisplatin). Electrochemotherapy with bleomycin was used to treat a patient for the first time in 1991 at the Institute Gustave Roussy in France, while electrochemotherapy with cisplatin was used to treat for the first time in 1995 at the Institute of Oncology, Ljubljana, Slovenia. Since then, more than 4000 patients were treated with electrochemotherapy all over the world (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA). Recently, new electrochemotherapy modalities have been developed for treatment of internal tumors using surgical procedures, endoscopic routes, or percutaneous approaches to gain access to the treatment area.

==Physical principle== thumb|360px|right|Basic steps in electrochemotherapy treatment When a biological cell is exposed to an electric field of sufficient strength, an increase in the transmembrane voltage is generated, which leads to rearrangements of the cell membrane structure. These changes result in an increase of the cell membrane permeability, which allows nonpermeant molecules to enter the cell. This phenomenon is called electroporation (or electropermeabilization) and is becoming widely used to improve anticancer drug delivery into cells, which is being referred to as electrochemotherapy.