Electric Fields Kill Tumors (CANCER)

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Electric Fields Kill TumorsPublished on Thursday, August 09, 2007.Source: Cryptogon For those of you who know that this news is about 75 years old, don’t hold your breath waiting to read the word Rife anywhere in this article. Since there is so much snake oil being pushed as Rife technology, I suppose it’s a good thing that this company is finally forcing the medical establishment into a corner. Is it exactly Rife technology? I don’t know. What I do know is that the underlying mechanism was identified by Rife three quarters of a century ago. Whether these guys wish to acknowledge that or not is their business. My guess is that they won’t/can’t mention it because of the industry that has sprung up around suppressing viable alternative cancer therapies.The fact that I have to fill in the blanks for a publication like MIT Technology Review is pretty terrifying. What else have they forgotten to mention?Via: MIT Technology Review:An Israeli company is conducting human tests for a device that uses weak electric fields to kill cancer cells but has no effect on normal cells. The device is in late-stage clinical trials in the United States and Europe for glioblastoma, a deadly brain cancer. It is also being tested in Europe for its effectiveness against breast cancer. In the lab and in animal testing, treatment with electric fields has killed cancer cells of every type tested. The electric-field therapy was developed by Yoram Palti, a physiologist at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa, who founded the company NovoCure to commercialize the treatment. Palti’s electric fields cause dividing cancer cells to explode while having no significant impact on normal tissues. The range of electric fields generated by the device harms only dividing cells. And since normal cells divide at a much slower rate than cancer cells, the electric fields target cancer cells. “An Achilles’ heel of cancer cells is that they have to divide,” says Herbert Engelhard, chief of neuro-oncology in the department of neurosurgery at the University of Illinois, Chicago.Even after chemotherapy, radiation therapy, and surgery, about 85 to 90 percent of glioblastoma patients’ cancer still progresses, and their survival rates are low, says Engelhard. He has about 10 glioblastoma patients enrolled in the trial, which is testing the unusual treatment in patients for whom all other approaches have failed. Engelhard says that the results are encouraging but that it’s too early to comment on the treatment’s efficacy.The electric fields’ different effects on normal and dividing cells mostly have to do with geometry. A dividing cell has what Palti calls “an hourglass shape rather than a round shape.” The electric field generated by the NovoCure device passes around and through round cells in a uniform fashion. But the narrow neck that pinches in at the center of a dividing cell acts like a lens, concentrating the electric field at this point. This non-uniform electric field wreaks havoc on dividing cells. The electric field tears apart important biological molecules, such as DNA and the structural proteins that pull the chromosomes into place during cell division. Dividing cells simply “disintegrate,” says Palti.Palti, who for years has been studying the effect of electric fields on cancer and normal cells, says that he has verified this mechanism in computer models and experiments in the lab. “The physics are solid,” says David Cohen, associate professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School.http://www.blacklistednews.com/view.asp?ID=3966The device itself costs only about $1,000 to manufacture…