How NASA’s moon mission could help transform space medicine

How NASA’s Moon Mission Could Help Transform Space Medicine

By K. R. Callaway edited by Claire Cameron

from NASA Artemis II The mission is en route to the Moon for a flight that will ultimately help inform long-term space exploration, including on the lunar surface itself. But before we can safely carry out such missions, scientists need to better understand how radiation and microgravity affect our bodies. This is why Artemis II is conducting a unique experiment of its kind: AVATAR, or A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response.

AVATAR uses organs-on-a-chip, liquid-filled devices, the size of a USB stick, that are covered in living human cells. They are designed to mimic different human organs, and because an individual’s cells can be grown on a chip, they can even mimic a specific person’s organs. Scientists have been studying these patterns on Earth since 2010 and have learned valuable insights about our biology, such as how the body might respond to new medications or stressors.

These organ-on-a-chip systems have been successfully tested and studied in low Earth orbit aboard the International Space Station, but Artemis II travels far beyond that. As a result, AVATAR could open new insights into how radiation and the microgravity environment around the Moon affect the body. Ultimately, the experiment could one day help NASA create personalized medical kits for astronauts.

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“This is going to be a huge step forward for us,” says Anthony Colaprete, acting director of the science directorate at NASA Ames Research Center, which is overseeing the experiment, “especially as we send more and more crews into space.”

Organs-on-a-chip allow scientists to use real human cells to research and test drugs and vaccines to model disease progression and map microbial interactions in ways that would be impossible or difficult with animal testing (although animal models remain crucial for some medical research).

AVATAR chips on board Integrity, Artemis IIfrom the spacecraft, contain bone marrow cells from the Artemis II astronauts and match a set of tokens left on Earth. When space chips return to Earth, researchers will use single-cell RNA sequencing to measure changes at the gene level in cells, tracing the effects of spaceflight over longer distances in greater detail than ever before.

Donald Ingber’s lab at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering created the first organs-on-a-chip more than a decade ago, and he is currently working with NASA on the AVATAR program.

“As someone who grew up watching all the NASA flights starting in the early 1960s and who, in many ways, was inspired to get into science because of the enthusiasm for exploration in the United States at that time, it was great to see the technology go into space,” he says.

“We have the potential to fly large numbers of organ chips in future studies and instrument the chips to obtain real-time functional images and readouts during actual flight in the future,” says Ingber.

Because of the small size of the chips, future lunar missions could allow many more scientific experiments to be conducted in the same space, and future medical kits could be more streamlined than those astronauts use today.

“Mass is still an essential commodity,” says Colaprete. “We can’t bring every medication available. We don’t have the transportation capacity, so having the ability to know exactly what you need to bring is extremely important.”

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