# Plasma Medicine Technologies
###### Abstract  
This Special Issue, entitled \"Plasma Medicine Technologies\", covers the latest remarkable developments in the field of plasma bioscience and medicine. Plasma medicine is an interdisciplinary field that combines the principles of plasma physics, material science, bioscience, and medicine, towards the development of therapeutic strategies. A study on plasma medicine has yielded the development of new treatment opportunities in medical and dental sciences. An important aspect of this issue is the presentation of research underlying new therapeutic methods that are useful in medicine, dentistry, sterilization, and, in the current scenario, that challenge perspectives in biomedical sciences. This issue is focused on basic research on the characterization of the bioplasma sources applicable to living cells, especially to the human body, and fundamental research on the mutual interactions between bioplasma and organic-inorganic liquids, and bio or nanomaterials.  
n onthermal plasma; plasma medicine; cancer; dental material; stem cells; neuronal regeneration; in vivo; ex vivo; bio-sterilization; decontamination +
Footnote †: journal: Medical Imaging and  
approaches to control and treat cancer are gaining more attention. [PERSON] et al. have demonstrated that extracts derived from plasma-treated mushrooms induce the death of breast cancer cells [1]. They also showed that plasma-treated mushroom groups produced high levels of phenolic and flavonoid compounds. They postulate that exposure to plasma can enhance the active properties and yield of mushroom constituents that could be useful for suppressing cancer cell growth.  
[PERSON] et al. investigated the role of a plasma-activated medium (PAM) on a human melanoma cancer cells' xenograft [2]. They performed gene expression analysis, a membrane degradation study, and a melanoma biomarker estimation using blood serum from xenograft mice bearing melanoma cells. They found that a PAM contains ROS, which induces the intracellular ROS level and activates the P53-signalling cascade, which consequently causes cancer cell death by activating apoptotic gene expression and degrading macromolecules. In another article, \"Ex Vivo Exposure of Human Melanoma Tissue to Cold Physical Plasma Elicits Apoptosis and Modulates Inflammation\", the authors used primary malignant melanoma metastasis tissues from a stage IV patient's ex vivo to analyze the susceptibility of this human melanoma tissue to plasma-induced cell death [3]. Quantitative imaging was used to analyze the amount of apoptotic cells in an unbiased fashion. Strikingly, it was found that the plasma treatment significantly increased the number of apoptotic cells compared to the untreated control tissue. This supports the motivation for using this novel technology in a clinical setting. Along those lines, it was also observed that the secretory profiles of the plasma-treated tissue changed, suggesting that the tumor-toxic plasma treatment also modulated inflammation inside the human melanoma tissue. Skin cancer was also dealt with in a review of [PERSON] and colleagues\" \"Medical Gas Plasma Treatment in Head and Neck Cancer--Challenges and Opportunities\" [4]. In this work, the current state-of-the-art knowledge on the plasma treatment of head and neck cancer is summarized for in vitro and in vivo studies. The team of authors concluded that plasma treatment not only might be a suitable treatment modality for these often-superficial tumor lesions but also proves to be very acceptable from the safety point of view, as no severe side effects have so far been described in head and neck cancer patients exposed to plasma.