Most people who ring us start with one question: how can a machine talk to a cell? We begin here.
All guidesThe science underneath
The Body's Own Electricity
Before any claim about any particular machine, there is a simpler question worth settling: is it actually true that electricity and living cells interact in ways medicine can use? That question has a long, well-documented answer, and none of it depends on the Cytotron.
You have almost certainly had your electricity measured
If you have ever had an ECG, you have had the electrical activity of your heart recorded on paper. If you have ever had an EEG, the same was done for your brain.
Those tests are not measuring blood, or oxygen, or chemistry. They are measuring electricity that your body generates by itself. Every heartbeat is triggered by an electrical impulse. Every thought and every movement travels along nerves as an electrical signal. This is not a metaphor or an alternative theory; it is why the machines in every hospital cardiology department work at all.
This matters here for one reason. The relationship between electricity and living tissue runs in both directions. Applied electromagnetic fields can influence how cells behave, and the electrical currents the body produces on its own can be detected and measured. The second half of that sentence is what makes an ECG possible. The first half is what makes electrical treatment possible.
An electrocardiogram: your heart's own electrical signal
Each spike is the electrical impulse that triggers one heartbeat, recorded from the surface of the skin.
Nothing was put into the body to produce this. The signal was already there.
A century of study, and much longer of observation
The interaction between electromagnetic fields and living matter has been a serious field of scientific research for the past hundred years or so. The phenomena themselves were noticed empirically by various civilisations a great deal earlier than that.
What a century of work has produced is a substantial body of experimental evidence pointing in two directions at once. It is possible to modulate biological functions and structures in a controlled way by applying electromagnetic fields. And it is possible to detect and measure the electrical currents that living organisms generate within themselves.
This is the foundation the rest of this page stands on, and it is worth being clear about what it does and does not prove. It does not prove that any particular device treats any particular disease. It does establish that the underlying idea, that you can influence a cell by electrical means, is ordinary mainstream science rather than a fringe proposition.
When people first hear about an electromagnetic cancer therapy, the reasonable instinct is scepticism. We would rather meet that scepticism directly than talk around it. The question of whether electricity affects cells is settled. The questions that remain are about how much, in which cells, and to what clinical benefit.
Electrical treatment is already routine medicine
This is the part that surprises people. Treating patients with electromagnetic energy is not new, not rare, and not confined to any one corner of medicine.
Pulsed electromagnetic fields have been used therapeutically across a range of conditions, most extensively in long-standing problems of the musculoskeletal system. The published literature covers their use in osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, multiple sclerosis, wound healing, fibromyalgia, tendonitis and pain.
In cancer specifically, radiofrequency energy is already in routine use. Radiofrequency ablation is performed regularly on tumours of the lung, liver, kidney and bone, and less often elsewhere. Electroporation, which uses electrical pulses to make cell membranes temporarily permeable, is used in the clinic to help chemotherapy drugs get inside tumour cells that would otherwise resist them.
An important distinction
None of the treatments named above is the Cytotron, and none of them is evidence that the Cytotron works. Radiofrequency ablation, for instance, destroys tissue with heat, which is precisely the mechanism RFQMR does not use. They are mentioned here for one narrow purpose: to show that using electrical and electromagnetic energy on patients is an established part of medicine with a real clinical track record, rather than something invented without a lineage. Whether this particular device helps a particular patient is a separate question, and the other pages in this section are where it is addressed.
The cell membrane as a gatekeeper
A cell's outer membrane is not a simple wall. It is a highly selective gate, constantly deciding what is allowed in and what is kept out.
This property is called selective permeability, and almost everything a cell does depends on it. Nutrients in, waste out, signalling molecules admitted at the right moment and refused at the wrong one, and a careful balance of charged particles maintained on each side. That balance is what produces the electrical charge across the membrane in the first place.
A substantial number of experimental studies have shown something directly relevant: it is possible to modify and control that selective permeability from outside the cell, by transmitting specialised, resonantly rotating radiofrequency waves at it. In other words, the gate can be influenced without anything physically touching it.
This is the hinge of the whole argument. Once you can influence the gate, and once you know that diseased cells differ physically from healthy ones, it becomes possible in principle to verify how each type reacts and then to select which cells you want to act on. That is what turns a general biological effect into something that could be aimed.
Selective permeability
Some particles are admitted through open channels; others are turned away.
Experimental work has shown this gating can be influenced from outside by resonantly rotating radiofrequency waves.
What has been seen in the laboratory
Moving from principle to observation: what actually happens when cells are exposed to specifically modulated radiofrequency radiation under controlled conditions?
Preliminary work carried out in vitro, meaning in cell cultures rather than in people, has recorded four kinds of change in cells exposed this way.
- Changes in cell morphology — the physical shape and structure of the cells altered
- Changes in cell proliferation — the rate at which the cells multiplied
- Cell fusion — cells merging with one another
- Necrosis — cell death
These were observed in lymphoblastoid cell lines and in some cancer cell lines. Alongside them, research has focused on a set of specific cell functions that appear susceptible to this kind of influence: the ion pumps that move charged particles across the membrane, the many enzyme reactions taking place in the cell fluid, and the processes involved in cell replication.
How much weight to put on this
Cell culture work is where nearly every cancer treatment begins, and it is a necessary step. It is also the step furthest from a patient. Cells in a dish do not have a blood supply, an immune system, or the surrounding tissue of a living person, and a great many effects seen in culture never translate into clinical benefit. These findings are a reason to investigate. They are not a result you should weigh as though it came from a trial.
Where the research is pointing
There is a line of scientific thinking, active well beyond this technology and this clinic, that treats a cell's electrical state as something central to cancer rather than incidental to it.
The proposal that the electrical charge across a cell's membrane is closely bound up with whether that cell proliferates goes back decades, to work by Clarence Cone. More recently, a review of transmembrane potential published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology argued that membrane depolarisation may be important for the emergence and maintenance of cancer stem cells, the cells thought to sustain tumour growth over time. The same review went further and suggested that membrane voltage could be artificially modified in order to inhibit tumour growth and spread.
Working along similar lines, researchers Chernet and Levin have reported that bioelectric signals can reveal, induce and normalise cancer, raising the possibility of influencing the voltage gradients within tissue to push cancerous cells back toward normal behaviour.
We include this because it is the intellectual context the Cytotron sits in, and because you may come across these ideas yourself. We would also ask you to read it in the right register. These are research directions and published hypotheses, not treatments you can receive and not claims about what will happen to your tumour.
What this page claims, and what it does not
It is worth ending by being precise, because pages like this one can easily be read as proving more than they do.
What it establishes. That your body generates measurable electrical activity. That the interaction between electromagnetic fields and living tissue has been studied seriously for a century. That electrical and electromagnetic treatments are already in routine clinical use. And that the cell membrane's gatekeeping can be influenced from outside by radiofrequency waves.
What it does not establish. Anything at all about whether the Cytotron will help you. Every item above concerns the scientific foundation the technology rests on, not the technology itself. A sound foundation is necessary but it is not sufficient, and plenty of treatments with excellent theoretical grounding have failed when properly tested.
For the evidence about the device itself, the other two pages in this section are the place to look.