Extracorporeal shock waves can be focused onto a small area inside the human body, and thus can provide a highly localized treatment of the tissue. However, main applications of shock waves in oncology are limited to the hyperthermia due to a major concern that the strong mechanical stress produced by the shock waves on the tumor will cause the tumor fragmentation with the subsequent metastization. A better solution is to use the shock waves not to destroy the tumor, but modify it so that the tumor becomes more sensitive to the chemotherapy.

We investigated the combined action of the shock waves and cytostatics (cyclophosphan) for localized drug delivery into tumor cells, both in vitro and in vivo. We found that combination of shock waves with cyclophosphan significantly enhanced the cyclophoshan treatment efficiency, depending nonlinearly on the number of shock wave pulses. To explain the findings, the studies of shock wave action at the cellular level were conducted. Shock waves significantly changed structural and functional characteristics of the cells, the concentration of lipid peroxidation (LPO) products, membrane