Lung cancer is a cancer with high percent of lethality. It is also known as a chemo- and radio- therapy resistant. Development of new effective method of treatment is unmet. Here we suggest a novel method of treatment based on low intensity millimeter waves (MMW) in the range 75-110 GHz which correspond to the wavelengths 2.7-4 mm. Cells are irradiated in continuous sweeping regimes with different exposure times. The effects of irradiation on cell death, survival, and morphology are described for adenocarcinoma of lung cancer cells. Our results showed that the cells irradiated for 2 and 4 minutes survived while the cells irradiated during 10 minutes died a few days later. In addition to the morphological changes, we observed two general effects in the survived populations:  cell mortality and senescence. The effect of mortality was more profound after 2 minutes of the irradiation while the senescence effect was more expressed after 4 minutes and both effects were observed 14 day later. Most important is that the effects were specific for cancer cells and not occurred in the non-tumorogenetic epithelial cells, MCF-10A. In view of very low power of the irradiation (≈ 1 mW in total), these effects have non-thermal character. Since this method offers strong pro-senescence effect it may be considered for therapeutic exploitation.

References

[1] Konstantin Komoshvili, Jacob Levitan, Stela Aronov, Asher Yahalom, Boris ‎Kapilevich, "Millimeter Waves Non-Thermal Effect on Human Lung Cancer Cells" ‎Proceedings of the 3rd International IEEE Conference on Microwaves, ‎Communications, Antennas and Electronic Systems (IEEE COMCAS2011), 7-9 ‎November, Hilton Tel-Aviv, Israel. Page(s): 1 – 4, ISBN: 978-1-4577-1692-8, ‎INSPEC Accession Number: 12442360, Digital Object Identifier: ‎‎10.1109/COMCAS.2011.6105865.‎

[2] K. Komoshvili, J. Levitan, A. Yahalom & S. Aronov "Method and Device ‎Using Millimeter Waves" US Provisional Application 61/905,297 filed November ‎‎18, 2013‎