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Every year, drug-resistant bacteria quietly turn routine infections into medical emergencies. The World Health Organisation has repeatedly flagged antimicrobial resistance as one of the top global health threats of our time, warning that common antibiotics are steadily losing their grip on the microbes they were designed to kill. Against this backdrop, an unlikely candidate has stepped into the picture: plasma, the same electrically charged gas that lights up the night sky as an aurora or crackles across the sky as lightning.
A weapon bacteria cannot easily dodge
Bacteria become resistant to antibiotics because drugs typically attack through a single chemical pathway, and a lucky mutation that blocks that one pathway is enough for a microbe to survive and multiply. Cold plasma works differently. When a gas such as air is energised by an electric field, it releases a cocktail of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species, charged particles, ultraviolet photons, and electric fields all at once, attacking a bacterial cell’s membrane, DNA and proteins simultaneously.
Mounting resistance to any single one of these mechanisms offers little protection against the rest, which is why plasma is considered far harder for microbes to outsmart than conventional antibiotics.
From the operating table to the wound dressing
Hospitals already lean on this property in several ways. Cold plasma jets are used to sterilise surgical tools and heat-sensitive medical plastics in seconds, sidestepping both the high temperatures of an autoclave and the chemical residues left by liquid disinfectants. In wound care, portable plasma devices are being trialled on chronic, hard-to-heal wounds such as diabetic ulcers, where they appear to both reduce the bacterial load on the wound surface and stimulate the body’s own regenerative response, a combination that few other tools offer in a single treatment.
Precision, not brute force
What makes plasma particularly attractive for medical use is how tightly its effects can be confined. Unlike a chemical disinfectant that spreads and lingers, a plasma discharge acts almost exclusively within the small volume where it is generated, allowing clinicians to target a specific area, a wound, an instrument, a patch of skin, without disturbing the surrounding tissue or the body’s natural microbial balance elsewhere.
Researchers are now exploring whether this same precision could be turned against cancer cells, with early laboratory studies suggesting that plasma-generated particles can trigger programmed cell death in tumour cells while sparing many of their healthy neighbours.
A regional research contribution
This global research effort now includes a contribution from Bahrain.
A study recently published in the peer-reviewed journal Plasma describes a radio-frequency air plasma system, developed at the University of Bahrain’s Department of Physics in collaboration with the Department of Biology and Salmaniya Medical Complex, that requires no specialised gas supply, a practical advantage for wider clinical adoption.
In laboratory tests against Escherichia coli, bacteria sitting directly inside the plasma discharge were inactivated rapidly, in some cases within seconds, while samples positioned just a few centimetres outside the active plasma region were left largely untouched. That sharp drop-off is a useful finding: it confirms the treatment can be aimed with real precision, rather than acting as a blunt, area-wide disinfectant.
What comes next
Cold plasma is not about to replace antibiotics, and much of its medical promise, particularly in cancer therapy, is still confined to the laboratory.
But as resistant infections continue to climb and hospitals look for tools that do not add to the resistance problem, a technology once associated mainly with semiconductor factories and space thrusters is increasingly finding a second career at the bedside – a shift local research is now actively helping to shape.
Dr Mahmood Nasser
Department of Physics
University of Bahrain
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