Immune response triggered by the ablation of hepatocellular carcinoma with nanosecond pulsed electric field

Abstract

Nanosecond pulsed electric field (nsPEF) is a novel, nonthermal, and minimally invasive modality that can ablate solid tumors by inducing apoptosis. Recent animal experiments show that nsPEF can induce the immunogenic cell death of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) and stimulate the host’s immune response to kill residual tumor cells and decrease distant metastatic tumors. nsPEF-induced immunity is of great clinical importance because the nonthermal ablation may enhance the immune memory, which can prevent HCC recurrence and metastasis. This review summarized the most advanced research on the effect of nsPEF. The possible mechanisms of how locoregional nsPEF ablation enhances the systemic anticancer immune responses were illustrated. nsPEF stimulates the host immune system to boost stimulation and prevail suppression. Also, nsPEF increases the dendritic cell loading and inhibits the regulatory responses, thereby improving immune stimulation and limiting immunosuppression in HCC-bearing hosts. Therefore, nsPEF has excellent potential for HCC treatment.

Keywords

nanosecond pulsed electric fields (nsPEF) / hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) / immune response / recurrence / metastasis

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by National S&T Major Project (No. 2018ZX10301201) and Innovative Research Groups of National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 81721091). The authors thank Dr. Lin Zhou, Dr. Haiyang Xie, Danjing Guo, and Liangjie Hong from Key Laboratory of Combined Multi-organ Transplantation, Ministry of Public Health for their comments.

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jianpeng Liu, Xinhua Chen, and Shusen Zheng declare that they have no financial conflicts of interest. This manuscript is a review article and does not involve a research protocol requiring approval by the relevant institutional review board or ethics committee.

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