Bioscience: NASA Selects Proposals to Study Adaptation and Response for Astronaut Missions to Moon and Mars
June 2020
In response to the 2019 Human Exploration Research Opportunities, NASA selected 21 proposals to help answer questions about astronaut health and performance during future long-duration missions beyond low-Earth orbit (LEO). The proposals will investigate biological, physiological, and behavioral adaptations during spaceflight in support of NASA’s crewed Artemis missions to the Moon and future human exploration of Mars. Out of the 129 proposals received, one of the research team led by Sylvain Costes, Ph.D., PI and GeneLab Project Manager, NASA BioScience, was chosen in the Human Research Program’s recent selection.
Eloise Pariset, Ph.D., Early Career Principal Investigator (USRA) is one of the Co-investigators on the research team led by Dr. Costes. One of the goal's of this project is to identify circulating biomarkers of individual radiation responses, this effort will be led by Dr. Pariset. As part of her Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) award, she has been collecting preliminary data regarding one of the selected biomarkers (exosomes). The new HRP funding will further the project by expanding the research to animal models, larger cohorts of human donors and better simulations of space radiation components.
For this effort, UCSF collaborator Susanna Rosi, Ph.D. has provided the animal research component collected through her own NASA HRP sponsored project “Probing the relative effects of radiation, altered gravity and social-isolation stress on tissue damage and behavioral, cognitive and sensorimotor functions to predict performance decrements”
Project title: Mapping peripheral immune signatures of mouse and human responses to space radiation for biomarker identification
Principal Investigator: Sylvain Costes, Ph.D. (NASA Ames Research Center)
Co-I/Science PI: Egle Cekanaviciute, Ph.D. (NASA Ames Research Center)
Co-I: Eloise Pariset, Ph.D. ( USRA at NASA Ames Research Center)
Collaborator: Susanna Rosi, Ph.D. (University of California, San Francisco)
