FLC | ISS scientists welcome new servings of Chips in Space

ISS scientists welcome new servings of Chips in Space

March 17, 2020

Working on the International Space Station takes heart and guts. Now ISS scientists have even more of both, as part of the Tissue Chips in Space research project that sent tiny bioengineered models of heart and intestinal tissue to the low-gravity laboratory in early March.

Tissue chips are miniature, 3-D models of human tissues designed to mimic functions of the human body and support living human tissues and cells. Each tissue chip is about the size of an AA battery and contains tiny hollow channels lined with tens of thousands of living human cells and tissues.

By studying heart and gut tissue models on the ISS National Lab, researchers hope to learn more about molecular changes in heart tissues exposed to the extreme environment of microgravity and get new insights into immune responses in the intestine that could help improve human health back on Earth.

The low-gravity environment on the ISS National Lab presents valuable opportunities for research that are not found on Earth. For example, low-gravity environments can cause changes in the human body that are similar to accelerated disease and aging processes. Because these changes happen relatively quickly, the tissue chips sent to the ISS National Lab allow researchers to model and study — on a much shorter timescale — conditions related to aging and disease that might take years to develop on Earth. Five tissue chip projects have already completed their first flight, but none have included heart or gut tissues.

The heart tissue chip project, led by researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle and Johns Hopkins University, will compare heart tissue grown on Earth with tissue grown in the low-gravity environment of the ISS National Lab over time to assess visible changes to the tissue and changes at the molecular level.

The gut tissue chip project, led by researchers at Boston-based biotechnology company Emulate, Inc., will look at how cells from intestinal lining, including immune cells, respond to salmonella bacteria and whether probiotics — such as the “good” bacteria found in yogurt and other foods — could protect the gut from infection. Such personalized treatments could be used for patients with gut health deficiencies on Earth as well as for space travelers.

Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) sent two dozen intestinal microbiome samples to the ISS as part of the same project. This pilot test comes with the hope of creating a plan for more of this testing out of LANL.

Both projects are funded through the Tissue Chips in Space initiative, which is a collaboration among the ISS National Lab and two components of the National Institutes of Health (the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences [NCATS] and the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering [NIBIB]).