Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine Studies Chemotherapy Response in Colorectal Tumor Organoids Aboard the Space Station, in a Project Launched October 13 with Samples Returning Later This Month
Researchers from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine are studying how microgravity affects how models of colorectal cancer cells respond to chemotherapy aboard the International Space Station, the institute announced on November 10 in Winston Salem, North Carolina.
The project, Tumor Avatars in Space, known as TAVIS, launched on October 13 aboard a NASA mission from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
Shay Soker, a professor at the institute and principal investigator of the study, said in the release that if microgravity makes these tumors more responsive, the team can look for the genetic changes behind that and try to induce the same changes here on Earth, adding that it is similar in spirit to immunotherapy, which makes tumors more visible to the immune system, and that the tumor can run, but it cannot hide.
On the background, colorectal cancer is one of the most diagnosed cancers in the United States. Chemotherapy remains a mainstay of treatment, but how well it works varies from person to person. Many patients whose tumors respond poorly could benefit from higher doses, but higher doses often are not possible because of side effects. Making tumors more responsive to chemotherapy could allow treatment to work better at doses patients can tolerate.
On the design, scientists at the institute built tumor organoids, small replicas of tumors grown in the laboratory from cancer cells obtained from patients with colorectal cancer, and used the models to test how chemotherapy drugs affect the tumor cells. In TAVIS, the organoids serve as stand ins, or avatars, for patients' tumors, allowing astronaut researchers to study how cancer cells change their response to chemotherapy in space while a matching control group is treated on Earth.
Once the samples return to Earth later this month, researchers at the institute will compare how the two groups responded.
On the next steps, if treatment proves effective in microgravity, the team will look for genetic factors, such as changes in cancer cell metabolism, that may be responsible for the difference, and then try to reproduce those changes on Earth by manipulating the same genes and cellular pathways. If the team identifies genetic changes that make tumors more responsive, the next step is to identify small molecule drugs that can induce those changes, with the goal of combining them with chemotherapy to make treatment more effective at lower, better tolerated doses.
TAVIS is a partnership with BioServe Space Technologies at the University of Colorado Boulder and with Axiom Space. The project is funded by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, which manages the International Space Station National Laboratory, and was selected through the National Lab's Igniting Innovation collaboration with NASA's Biological and Physical Sciences Division.
Anthony Atala, director of the institute and co principal investigator of the study, said in the release that the International Space Station provides a unique research environment for studying biological processes under conditions that cannot be reproduced on Earth, and that examining how these tumor models respond in microgravity may yield new insights into tumor biology and treatment response that may ultimately benefit patients.
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Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: Wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons 词条主图：Forest Research Institute (India)
