1. Small tissue chips with big opportunities for space medicine
- Author
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Xuan Mu, Weishen He, Victoria Abril Manjarrez Rivera, Raul Armando Duran De Alba, Dava J. Newman, and Yu Shrike Zhang
- Subjects
Radiation ,Extraterrestrial Environment ,Ecology ,Weightlessness ,Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis ,Aerospace Medicine ,Humans ,Mars ,Astronauts ,Astronomy and Astrophysics ,Space Flight ,Agricultural and Biological Sciences (miscellaneous) - Abstract
The spaceflight environment, including microgravity and radiation, may have considerable effects on the health and performance of astronauts, especially for long-duration and Martian missions. Conventional on-ground and in-space experimental approaches have been employed to investigate the comprehensive biological effects of the spaceflight environment. As a class of recently emerging bioengineered in vitro models, tissue chips are characterized by a small footprint, potential automation, and the recapitulation of tissue-level physiology, thus promising to help provide molecular and cellular insights into space medicine. Here, we briefly review the technical advantages of tissue chips and discuss specific on-chip physiological recapitulations. Several tissue chips have been launched into space, and more are poised to come through multi-agency collaborations, implying an increasingly important role of tissue chips in space medicine.
- Published
- 2022
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