How can microgravity influence muscle regeneration and overall muscle loss in astronauts? This is what a recent study published in Stem Cell Reports hopes to address as an international team of researchers investigated how muscle loss and lack of regeneration in microgravity could be treated using a novel drug could help limit this impairment. This study holds the potential to help researchers and astronauts better understand the long-term effects of microgravity on the human body, specifically as countries around the world are sending more and more humans into space.
“Space is a really unique environment that accelerates qualities associated with aging and also impairs many healthy processes,” said Dr. Ngan Huang, who is an associate professor in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Stanford University and a co-author on the study. “Astronauts come back with muscle atrophy, or a reduction of muscle function, because the muscle isn’t being actively used in the absence of gravity. As space travel becomes more common and available to civilians, it’s important to understand what happens to our muscle in microgravity.”
For the study, the researchers sent engineered human muscles to the International Space Station (ISS) to conduct a 7-day experiment regarding how much muscle was lost and a novel drug that could be used to reduce this muscle loss, a focus on sarcopenia, which is a condition associated age-related muscle loss.
Astronauts on the International Space Station conducting experiments on engineered muscles to evaluate muscle loss. (Credit: NASA)
During the experiment, astronauts on the ISS treated the engineered muscles with drugs to treat the sarcopenia, which they discovered partially prevented muscle loss. A similar experiment was conducted on Earth under normal gravity conditions without the drugs and was discovered that gene activity remained the same between both experiments.
“This concept of engineered tissue chip platform in microgravity is a potentially transformative tool that could allow us to study a variety of diseases and do drug screening without animal or human subjects,” said Dr. Huang.
What new discoveries about muscle loss in microgravity will researchers make in the coming years and decades? Only time will tell, and this is why we science!
As always, keep doing science & keep looking up!
Sources: Stem Cell Reports, EurekAlert!