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The latest SpaceX mission will be launched in the early hours of Saturday, when a Falcon 9 rocket will take off in the air and deliver 5,500 pounds of new supplies and experiments to the International Space Station.
On board: living tissue grown on tiny chips created by the National Center for the Advancement of Translational Sciences (NCATS) could help us understand and treat human diseases in microgravity.
The space can affect the human body. This is largely due to the fact that human beings have never really been designed to float in weightlessness. Without the support of gravity against the body, bone density and muscle mass decrease rapidly. Lack of gravity causes the circulation of all fluids in the body, which can wreak havoc on the cardiovascular system, kidney function and even the shape of the eyes.
These changes happen remarkably quickly. And they often quickly simulate the types of diseases that affect the inhabitants of the Earth. The loss of bone density in astronauts, for example, is very similar to what happens to people on the ground who are struggling with osteoporosis.
"If we send our tissue samples in space, we can see changes occurring over a very short period, which could normally take a lot of time here on Earth," Lucie Low, NCATS scientist involved in experiments, said the daily beast.
The use of a cloth chip (a transparent plastic device, about half the size of a standard smartphone, with carefully designed chambers that organize and house living human tissue in three dimensions ) offers a solution to study diseases and ailments without the need to have to use animal models or human participants.
Scientists can simply place a flea under a microscope and notice the loss of bone density or the formation of kidney stones in real time without having to open a living organism.
The chips that will arrive at the International Space Station on Friday include tissue models that should simulate some common human pathologies: lung and bone marrow chips to study bone marrow activation and immune cell behavior; kidney chips to understand the formation and prevention of kidney stone formation; bone and cartilage fragments designed to mimic the development of osteoporosis; and fleas modeling the blood-brain barrier that could potentially reveal new ways to treat many types of brain diseases.
Even if we do not learn anything that can lead to a new type of treatment for a new disease, we will learn at least something new about the cellular behaviors that cause many types of disease states.
"They are very specifically designed to recreate the architecture of your body's cells on a chip," Low said. "They are recreating the structure and function of the tissues in your own body."
The pulmonary chip, for example, effectively recreates the mechanical and biochemical movements and functions of a lung lung, expanding and contracting like our lungs.
Space is a problem, however. The ISS is quite compact compared to state-of-the-art laboratories on Earth. These experiments are therefore designed to be simple and self-contained, requiring relatively little crew intervention, with the exception of minor tasks such as valve changes, biological media collection and freezing of tissue. the end of the test.
When the fleas are brought back to Earth, scientists on the ground will microscopically observe and perform tests to determine the amount of microgravity that transformed the tissues in such a short time. They will tell scientists how to prevent or prevent some common human diseases. stopped
This does not mean that ISS astronauts will be equally enthusiastic to observe them alone. "I know [the astronauts] be enthusiastic about seeing the heart cells beat in microgravity, among other things, "Low said. "As much as possible, we would like to involve the crews in their time and keep them engaged."
Whatever changes we observe, they may help us understand new ways of treating many types of diseases, revealing new drug pathways, or alluding to the type of genes that cause these diseases. Digesting this information and transferring it to the field of clinical research will, however, take some time.
But, as Low said, science is an iterative process. Each scientific experiment you perform is a piece of the puzzle that helps to inform other knowledge acquired later.
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