Avatars for Astronaut Health to Fly on NASA’s Artemis II

NASA has announced a pioneer experience that aims to bring personalized medicine to new heights. Experience is part of a strategic plan to collect precious scientific data during the Artemis II mission, allowing NASA to “know before returning” to the lunar surface and to Mars.

The study of the avatar (an analog response of virtual astronaut fabric) will use organ devices on chip, or organ chips, to study the effects of the radiation and the microgravity of the deep space on human health. The chips will contain cells of the astronauts from Artemis II and will fly side by side with the crew on their trip of around 10 days around the Moon. This research, combined with other studies on the health and performance of Artemis II astronauts, will give a preview of NASA on the best way to protect astronauts as exploration develops on the surface of the moon, March and beyond.

“Avatar is a visionary experience of NASA tissue chips which will revolutionize the way we do science, medicine and human multi-planetary exploration,” said Nicky Fox, associate administrator, Directorate of the Scientific Mission at the NASA headquarters in Washington. “Each fabric chip is a tiny sample in a unique way so that we can examine how the effects of the deep space act on each human explorer before going to make sure that we pack the appropriate medical supplies adapted to the needs of each individual while we return to the moon and to Mars.”

The survey is a collaboration between NASA, government agencies and industry partners, taking advantage of commercial expertise to acquire a more in -depth understanding of biology and human diseases. This research could accelerate innovations in personalized health care, both for astronauts in space and patients on earth.

Organ shavings, also called tissue chips or microphysiological systems, are about the size of a USB thumb and used to help understand – then predict – how an individual could react to a variety of stress factors, such as radiation or medical treatments, including pharmaceutical products. Essentially, these small devices serve as “avatars” to human organs.

Organ chips contain living human cells that are great to model the structures and functions of specific regions in human organs, such as brain, lungs, heart, pancreas and liver – they can beat like a heart, breathe like a lung or metabolize like a liver. Tissue shavings can be linked to each other to imitate how organs interact with each other, which is important to understand how the whole human body reacts to stressors or treatments.

Researchers and oncologists today use human tissue shavings to understand how specific patient cancer could react to different drugs or radiotherapy treatments. To date, a standard step for flea organs has been to keep human cells healthy for 30 days. However, NASA and other research institutions repel these borders by increasing the longevity of organ chips to a minimum of six months so that scientists can observe diseases and drug therapies over a longer period.

The Artemis II mission will use organ shavings created using the rod cells and the blood, forming blood, which come from the bone marrow, crew members of Artemis II.

The bone marrow is one of the organs most sensitive to exposure to radiation and, therefore, of central importance for human space flight. It also plays a vital role in the immune system, because it is the origin of all adult red and white blood cells, which is why researchers aim to understand how the radiation of deep space affects this organ.

Studies have shown that microgravity affects the development of bone marrow cells. Although the international space station operates in low terrestrial orbit, which is protected by most cosmic and solar radiation by the Earth’s magnetosphere, astronauts often suffer a loss of bone density. Since the Artemis II crew will fly beyond this protective layer, Avatar researchers also seek to understand how the stressors of stressor combined with the radiation and the microgravity of the deep space affect developing cells.

To make bone marrow chips, Artemis II astronauts will first make a gift of plates to a local health system. The remaining cells of their samples will contain a small percentage of rod cells and offspring derived from the bone marrow. Scientists funded by NASA at Erulate, Inc., who have developed organ fleas technology used in Avatar, will purify these cells with magnetic balls that are specifically binding them. The purified cells will then be placed in the bone marrow chips next to the cells of the blood vessels and other support cells to model the structure and the function of the bone marrow.

The study of the way in which radiation affects bone marrow can give an overview of how radiotherapy and other agents damage DNA, such as chemotherapeutic drugs, alter the formation of blood cells. Its meaning for space flight and earth medicine makes bone marrow an ideal organ to study in the Avatar Artemis II project.

“For NASA, organ chips could provide vital data to protect the health of astronauts on the missions of deep space,” said Lisa Carnell, director of the NASA biological and physical science division at NASA headquarters. “As we go further and stay in space longer, the crew will have limited access to clinical health care on site.

During the Artemis II mission, organ chips will be secured in a personalized payload developed by Space Tango and climbed inside the capsule during the mission. The payload supplied by battery will keep automated environmental control and the delivery of supports to organ fleas throughout the flight.

Upon his return, researchers will imitate examine how space flights affected bone marrow chips by performing a unique RNA sequencing, a powerful technique that measures how thousands of genes change in individual cells. Scientists will compare the data from the flight samples to the measures of the crew cells used in a ground immunology study taking place simultaneously. This will provide the most detailed look at the impact of the space flight and the radiation of deep space on the development of blood cells to date.