In a narrow definition, plasma medicine is the application of body-temperature cold plasma devices for medical purposes. If considering the more general application of plasma devices in medicine, independent of the operating temperature, electrosurgical argon plasma devices have been successfully applied in medicine for decades for cutting and coagulating tissue. Accordingly, such devices have successfully received regulatory approval as certified medical devices. In this work, we assessed the suitability of an electrosurgical argon plasma device with a novel set of parameters allowing operation at lower temperatures. We studied the device's ability to generate reactive species and measured their penetration into hydrogels and human HT29 colon cancer cell toxicity to motivate future studies of this device's operation mode in gastrointestinal oncology.
Martinet et al. (Wed,) studied this question.