Mechanism of Irreversible Electroporation in Cells: Insight from the Models

In the last 20 years, electroporation studies have focused primarily on reversible electroporation because of its importance for drug and gene delivery. Irreversible electroporation (IRE) was mostly studied in the context of the delayed tissue damage in high-voltage accidents [70, 69], the postshock arrhythmias during defibrillation [51, 50], and biofouling control [46, 95]. Very recently, IRE has shown great promise as a nonthermal technique for the ablation of tumors and arrhythmogenic regions in the heart [20, 27, 91, 85, 4, 68]. IRE’s ability to create a complete and predictable cell ablation with a sharp transition between normal and necrotic tissue, while sparing neighboring blood vessels, connective tissue, and nerves, has great advantages in a variety of medical applications.