ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Molecular and Cellular Oncology
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1520504
Comprehensive Simulations of Intracellular Electric Fields during Exposure to Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields)
Provisionally accepted
- 1College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nan Jing 210016, Jiangsu, China
- 2Department of Radiotherapy, Shanghai Fourth People’s Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
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Electric fields, as a unique physical form, have been widely used to manipulate and modulate biological processes. Tumor treating fields (TTFields) is one of the electro-therapy methods that deliveries intermediate frequency (100 kHz -300 kHz), low intensity (1 V/cm -3 V/cm) sinusoidal alternating current (AC) electric fields to inhibit tumor cell growth. When the tumor cells are exposed to TTFields, intracellular electric fields distribution will be a crucial clue for evaluating therapeutic effects and revealing mechanisms. This work systematically studied the TTFields distribution penetrating into the tumor cells by finite element method (FEM) simulations. We analyzed and compared the effects of various variables on the intracellular electric fields, including TTFields parameters, cellular geometry, and cellular electrical properties. We found that TTFields frequency, cell radius, cell membrane permittivity, cytoplasmic conductivity have significant impacts on the strength of intracellular electric fields. The results can be helpful for revealing TTFields mechanisms, explaining optimal parameter selection and better TTFields protocol design for different tumor types.
Keywords: Tumor treating fields, intracellular electric fields, Parameter effects, FEM, comprehensive simulations
Received: 18 Dec 2024; Accepted: 06 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Dai, Liu, Fang, Li and Gao. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wei Gao, Department of Radiotherapy, Shanghai Fourth People’s Hospital, School of Medicine, Tongji University, Shanghai, China
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