ORLANDO, Fla. – A very small part from Florida Hospital research study participants will be taking a weeklong trip 200 miles above Earth's surface to help researchers take a closer look at the effects of microgravity and aging on muscles.
Samples taken from the thigh muscle of eight participants in a National Institute of Health-funded study on aging and muscle loss will journey into space Saturday Matching cells from the same participants will remain on Earth for comparison.
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The cells will catch a ride in Northrop Grumman's Cygnus cargo spacecraft, launching from NASA's Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Virginia, on Saturday at 4:21 a.m. on the Antares rocket.
The cells will leave Earth as part of a Florida Hospital's Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes study, led by Dr. Paul Coen, an investigator at TRI. The research branch focuses on combining research to better understand the causes of diabetes and obesity, as well as aging.
Previous experiments on the space station have focused on muscle tissue. The Florida Hospital TRI study is among the first to take a step back and send muscle cells.
The reason for this, Coen said, is to prevent any cross-talk between cells in muscle tissue. Within muscle tissue there are releases of molecules that then communicate with other organs in the body to maintain overall health.
By limiting the experiment to cells, "it rules out any cell-to-cell or tissue-to-tissue cross-talk," Coen said.
The cells will be on a self-contained "lab on a chip," developed by Dr. Siobhan Malany, president of Micro-gRX. Two business card-size laboratories will act as a lab within the space station lab, equipped with microscopes and electronics to monitor the subjects throughout the process.
"In these chips we can grow muscle cells and we can keep them growing and keep them happy," Coen said.
The cells have a limited lifespan. They will spend seven days on the space station under microgravity and then be frozen before coming back to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule in January.
Then Coen and his team will get to work finding out how muscle cells react to a weightless environment by looking at the gene expression changes in the space cells compared to the ones that remained on Earth.
"It's kind of a global view of changes in the cell," Coen said.
The findings, explains Coen, could help find treatments for age-related muscle loss as well as for patients confined to bed rest for an extended time and the muscle loss astronauts experience during extended space stays.
"Data we generate from these experiments provide us with a deeper understand of the mechanisms of muscle loss," Coen said.
Malany has already secured funding through the National Institute of Health for the next five years to send the next round of muscle cells to the space station.
The muscle cells are among several experiments headed to the International Space Station designed to study microgravity’s effects on human health. Low-gravity can cause changes in human cells over a short time period that look like aging and disease on Earth, speeding up research needed to develop treatments and medicine.