Editorial: Plasma biomedicine

Since the 1990s, cold atmospheric plasmas (CAPs) have contracted much attention of researchers and engineers in the world, and have obtained dramatic development. One of the reasons comes from their intrinsic features, for example, all the CAPs can operate in an open environment, and the gas temperatures are close to the room temperature. Such range of pressure and temperature coincides with those of life on the Earth. Therefore, the CAPs can be readily used for organisms, e.g., plasma therapy, disinfection and sterilization, food preservation and genome mutation. In addition, the low gas temperature of the CAPs also makes them suitable to treat heat-sensitive medical instruments for sterilization or to modify bio-medical materials for improving their surface properties.
The academic exchanges in this interdisciplinary field of plasma biomedicine grew up exuberantly since the early of this century. The first International Conference on Plasma Medicine was held in 2007 in USA; the International Society for Plasma Medicine was founded in 2009; the First National Symposium on Plasma Medicine was held in 2013 in China; and recently, the first International Workshop on Plasma Agriculture was also held in 2016 in USA. The research activities of the Chinese scholars in this field are also very active, and have led to several sub-branches covering the fields of medicine, bio-chemical engineering, agriculture, food industry, etc. During the 18th National Conference on Plasma Science and Technology held in 26–29 July 2017 in Xi’an of China, the session of ‘Plasma Biomedicine and Biological Applications’ had attracted many researchers for reporting their latest academic progress. The growing interests of this research topic and the excited recent advancements have motivated this special issue. This collection of 11 original research papers and 1 review paper is devoted to the fundamental and application studies of the CAPs related with biomedicine. The contributions cover the fields of biology, medicine, agriculture and food industry.
As the guest editors of this special issue, we are very happy to have attracted a collection of excellent papers from the experts in China and Japan which covers most of the sub-branches of plasma biomedicine. We would also like to thank all the authors for their outstanding contributions, all the reviewers for their evaluations on the merits of the manuscripts and their helpful advice to the authors, as well as the editorial and publishing staff of Plasma Science and Technology, in particular, the Editor-in-Chief, Dr Yunfeng Liang, for his tremendous support, and Dr Ping Xu in the preparation of this special issue at any stage. It is our sincere hope that you enjoy reading this special issue, and that it will be a reference and helpful guidance for young researchers embarking in the field of plasma biomedicine.