Can Astronaut Cells Survive Deep Space?

Erik Gregersen: They’ve done tumors on a chip, they’ve done muscles on a chip, they’ ve done a little brain on a chip. I mean, it’s not like a whole dang brain, it’s just a line of cells. AVATAR stands for A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response. It’s a technology known as an organ on a chip. It’s something about the size of a little USB drive. They took blood from each of the four astronauts. They differentiated it into the stem cells into bone marrow cells. Your bone marrow is very important because that’s where your white blood cells come from which are the basis of your immune system. The astronauts on Artemis II are going to go around the moon, which means they will be in a very different radiation environment. What they hope to see from this experiment is how will these bone marrow cells of the four astronauts react to this environment? Their main focus is on astronauts and having them survive long periods in deep space. We would be able to learn about cells and their radiation response. Radiation is used in cancer treatment. Understanding even how that works in these weird conditions will help with treatments on Earth like with immunotherapies and probably with chemotherapies as well.