Need to model aging in a hurry? Do it in the space

What do you do when you study age-related diseases but can not wait for tissue models to reach old age? You send them in space, of course.

It's no secret that after astronauts travel through space, they experience age-like changes: bone loss, muscle breakdown, and immune system damage, to name a few. These result from prolonged exposure to microgravity, or of a "decreased or near zero gravity relative to the Earth". Scientists from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the International Space Station (ISS) are exploiting these accelerating effects of age to create patterns of various age-related diseases, a process that includes sending models of tissue in space.

Tissue fragments, also called tissue on chip or organ-on-chip, are tiny 3D models of human organ systems. Scientists use them to model diseases and test the potential impact of drugs on specific organs. NIH has reached an agreement with StemoniX this week to use its brain-on-chip technology in opioid research.

"Tissue chips in the space allow modeling various diseases of the aging process, such models can be difficult or time-consuming to develop here on Earth but are greatly facilitated in microgravity, and scientists can use them to develop drugs that can prevent or slow down these diseases, "said Danilo Tagle, Ph.D., associate director of special initiatives at the National Center for the Advancement of Translational Science (NCATS) of the NIH, in a statement. "Bringing this technology into space is an unprecedented opportunity to use tissue chips to accelerate the translational development of interventions intended to be used here on Earth to treat many age-related diseases. "

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NCATS, NIH's National Institute of Imaging and Biomedical Engineering, as well as the US National ISS Laboratory, are supporting the research as part of their tissue chip program in space. The first chipset, developed at the University of California at San Francisco to model the immune system, arrived at the ISS in December. A second shipment must take off this weekend.

This set includes lung and bone marrow chips from the Philadelphia Children's Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania, University of Washington kidney fleas, MIT bone and cartilage fleas and fleas modeling the blood-brain barrier of the biotechnology company Emulate. The hope is that these projects will accelerate the development of treatments for osteoarthritis, kidney stones and other conditions.

Lucie Low, Ph.D., chief scientist for the NIH drug screening drug screening program, said Lucie Low, Ph.D., announced that the Space Station team would infect flea lung and bone marrow with Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium associated with diseases acquired in the hospital.

"They will see how the bacterium affects lung tissue – because we know the immune system is moving in space", and they will also see how the bone marrow responds to this lung infection by mobilizing neutrophils, which are globules. white, in the bone marrow, "she said.

The cartilage and bone fragments will be models of post-traumatic osteoarthritis of the knee joint.

"They will look at different types of" omic "results from tissues when they will be in microgravity: proteomics, metabolomics, different types of cellular, molecular and metabolic changes in tissues resulting from microgravity," Low said.

The kidney flea will help with osteoarthritis research and kidney stone research.

"Astronauts seem to be suffering from an increased number of kidney stones and losing a lot of bone mass very quickly when they enter microgravity," she said. "Because the kidneys filter a lot of blood, an increase in the calcium concentration extracted from the microgravity bones occurs in the kidneys as kidney stones.

Tissue chips are expected to dock at Cape Canaveral, Florida this weekend, as part of a payload of over 5,400 pounds including crew supplies, equipment and supplies. 39, other scientific experiments. The launch was postponed twice this week due to technical issues. It is now scheduled for Saturday morning.