PUSHING BOUNDARIES IN SPACE TO IMPROVE LIFE ON EARTH
Chandan Sen
If someone said they could reprogram a person’s cells and then transplant them back on the skin’s surface to create excitable neural cells for the brain to help heal after injury, what would you think? For Chandan Sen, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, this is a reality and only takes 100 milliseconds of contact with a tiny silicone chip.
The technology is called tissue nanotransfection, or TNT. It achieves reprogramming of the tissue in the live body—no sophisticated laboratory infrastructure required. That means TNT is cost efficient, scalable and does not rely on access to specialized resources. Fourteen peer-reviewed papers later, Sen truly sees the impact of his work. “We presented data after data after data to win the confidence of our peers that indeed skin can be reprogramed using a silicon chip to make functioning blood vessels,” says Sen.
Research in Sen’s lab takes advantage of the body’s own resilience to help regenerate tissue that has been injured in a traumatic injury or is losing function due to age. “This is not looking for the fountain of youth,” says Sen. “This is looking for a way to maximize functionality for as long as we live.”
“It’s important to come in with a fertile mind, curiosity and humility, acknowledging the vastness of the unknown compared to the little known.”
There are two major approaches to obtain specialized tissue with desired functionality. The first is tissue engineering, which relies on a scaffold where building-block cells are placed in the right order. The second is to recapitulate some aspects of developmental biology—known to generate tissues in the mother’s womb—in the adult body. TNT relies on the latter.
Someday, part of maximizing tissue functionality may include a trip to space.
“Muscle atrophy, brittle bones, puffy heads, eye disease—enough people are looking at what does not work when we go to space,” says Sen. “We want to understand how the body adapts in response to exposure to this new natural environment.”
Everything we know today about the limits of the human body is conditional; we only know those limits are true when we are on Earth. “We learned them as if they are absolute limits,” says Sen, but they are not. The limits of the human body and the way it functions may shift off-Earth.
“The power of human resilience is amazing. Once we know the constraints are not so absolute, perhaps we can bring someone to space and leverage the adaptive forces in the body for therapeutic purposes,” says Sen, who oversees the creation of a proposed Center for Space Biomedicine in the McGowan Institute. He imagines a day when people go to space for medical procedures that are only possible when our bodies change in response to being in that environment.
Sen already has seen some of the differences by studying mice. After 42 days on the International Space Station, genomic plasticity went up in about a third of the mice, which is indicative of functional adaptations. What factors exactly cause those changes, Sen doesn’t yet know. “Space biomedicine represents a lucrative frontier with tremendous opportunities to gain insight into new therapeutic opportunities on Earth,” adds Sen.
“Sometimes ignorance is bliss, especially in space medicine. It makes room for unbiased exploration,” says Sen. “It’s important to come in with a fertile mind, curiosity and humility, acknowledging the vastness of the unknown compared to the little known.”