Imagine wearing a lightweight device on your body that sends out gentle electric fields — not painful zaps, just invisible waves — and those waves help slow down one of the deadliest kinds of breast cancer. That is exactly what researchers at The Ohio State University have been testing in mice, and the results are drawing attention.
The device uses low-intensity electric fields to target triple-negative breast cancer, a particularly aggressive form of the disease. Unlike other breast cancers, triple-negative tumors lack the usual hormone or protein markers that many drugs are designed to hit. That makes them harder to treat. Chemotherapy is often the main option, and the cancer has a higher chance of coming back or spreading to other organs like the lungs and brain.
In the study, published in the journal Breast Cancer: Targets and Therapy, researchers placed mice with triple-negative breast cancer inside a setup where low-intensity electric fields were generated around them. The mice could move around freely while being treated. The researchers found that the electric fields interfered with several things cancer cells need to survive: how they move, how they spread to other parts of the body, and how they produce energy.
But the treatment seemed to do more than just attack cancer cells directly. When the cancer had spread to the lungs, the treatment also reduced the number of immune-suppressing cells in the area and increased the cancer-fighting immune cells. In other words, the electric fields appeared to change the environment around the tumor in a way that helped the body recognize and attack the cancer.
"When people hear 'electric fields,' they may picture something like being shocked or zapped," said Jonathan Song, Ph.D., a researcher at the OSUCCC—James Cancer Center and a professor of engineering at Ohio State. "That is not what we are talking about. The current does not run through the body. Instead, a wearable device can generate low-intensity fields that interact with cancer cells in a controlled way."
Existing electric field-based cancer treatments require contact electrodes placed directly on the skin. This new approach could work from outside the body using a wearable device, making it potentially less invasive.
The findings come from preclinical studies using mice, not patients. The research team has partnered with a company called EMBioSys Inc. to develop an actual wearable device, which is now scheduled to be tested in a National Institutes of Health-sponsored clinical trial involving human patients.
"This technology is still in an early stage, and the next step is clinical testing," Song said. "But the idea that a wearable, low-powered device could one day help treat breast cancer as part of a patient's daily life is very compelling."