About Plasma Medicine
A bright future for plasma medicine
With the help of plasma, the course of some diseases can be considerably shortened. Other diseases, for which no cure existed up to now, can be healed and again others can be treated without causing the patient pain.
Plasma medicine is emerging worldwide and some promising applications are on the horizon. Direct therapeutic plasma applications as the central element of plasma medicine will bring physical plasmas directly on or in the human (or animal) body. The basis for these treatments are plasma sources: plasma generating devices, developed to be applied in medical practices and hospitals.
Campus PlasmaMed is a research association, founded to explore promising and safe applications of atmospheric pressure plasmas in medical therapy, based on systematic and interdisciplinary basic research and interactions of plasma components with living systems.
Whereas the first cooperation in this fiend began among researchers in Greifswald, this project describes a campus in the figurative sense only. It is a coalition of the following renowned and ambitious research institutes, universities, hospitals and enterprises:
Leibniz Institute for Plasma Science and Technology (INP Greifswald),
Ernst Moritz Arndt University Greifswald,
University of Rostock,
University of Applied Sciences Stralsund,
Ferdinand-Braun-Institut für Höchstfrequenztechnik,
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin,
Research Center Wismar,
University of Applied Sciences and Arts Göttingen as well as
Cinogy GmbH
The Campus is divided into six key projects, each dealing with a distinct aspect of plasma medicine. Next to four key projects that relate directly to different medical applications (PlasmaDerm to dermatology, PlasmaDent to dentistry, PlasmaImp to implant medicine, and PlasmaCure to the wound-healing effects of plasma), two key projects deal with the characterization of adequate plasma sources (PlasmaSources) as well as a detailed in-vitro examination of biological plasma effects (PlasmaVitro). These are two crucial preconditions to any biomedical experiment or potential therapeutic application.
Even though initial plasma source characterization and optimization lie within the main responsibility of plasma physicists and engineers, potential users from the biomedical field are integrated at a very early stage in order to consider special needs and constraints for specific applications. This multidisciplinary research cooperation among plasma scientists and engineers on the one side, and life scientists and clinicians on the other is one of the main characteristics of the Campus PlasmaMed.
Campus PlasmaMed is supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). After a positive evaluation of the first funding phase (2008-2010), the Campus entered its second phase as of January 2011.