UW scientists among national group promoting health in space

By Sandra Hines
News & Information
- and -
Walter Neary
HS News & Community Relations

Martin Kushmeric, left, and Mike Bailey with the apparatus that demonstrates how sound waves might one day be used to generate heat inside the body with pinpoint accuracy to cauterize bleeding or kill unwanted tissue such as tumors.

In order to one day send astronauts to Mars, UW researchers last week were awarded $3.6 million for space-medicine projects ranging from work on a device that will use sound waves to cauterize internal bleeding - without surgery or affecting surrounding tissue - to research into the effects of long-duration space travel on the human body.

The National Space Biomedical Research Institute, a 12-institution consortium working with NASA to research whether astronauts could survive a planned 2014 mission to Mars, announced the funding and named Lawrence Crum of the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory the co-leader of a national group investigating medical systems to treat injuries and illnesses. Martin Kushmerick of the UW’s Health Science Center was named the leader of scientists from five institutions working on helping humans cope with space travel.

“We are excited to be part of a nationwide program dedicated to improving human health in space. We expect this work to provide important insights and treatments for those of us who will remain on Earth,” says Kushmerick, a professor of radiology, bioengineering and physiology and biophysics.

Consider, for example, an astronaut - or a driver thrown from a car during a traffic accident - who suffers an injury causing internal bleeding. An ultrasound device would first be used to determine where the bleeding is occurring - something that is possible with ultrasound in hospitals and clinics today. Now imagine a device where the intensity of the ultrasound is increased and focused so it generates heat inside the body with pinpoint accuracy to cauterize the bleeding. The ultrasound can be focused on an area as small as a grain of rice and, thus, not affect surrounding tissue unlike methods using lasers or other forms of radiation, which heat and affect the skin and tissue they travel through to the site that needs treatment.

“It sounds like ‘Star Trek,’” says Michael Bailey, a member of Crum’s group at the Applied Physics Laboratory, in reference to the medical tricorder used by the doctor, Bones McCoy, on the television show. Bailey said at a demonstration last week in conjunction with the funding announcement that it might be possible to have a device that an individual astronaut could even use on himself or herself if necessary. Such a device could also be used to kill tissue such as tumors.

The Center for Industrial and Medical Ultrasound here at the UW is led by Crum and comprised of researchers from bioengineering, radiology, surgery and the Applied Physics Laboratory. It is to receive $900,000 during the next three years to further develop plans for the medical system using high-intensity focused ultrasound. The rest of the UW’s $3.6 million goes to projects studying the body’s response to traveling in space for long periods.

Kushmerick is leader of the Integrated Human Function Team with investigators from five institutions working on six different projects. His own project concerns integrating human muscle energetics and mechanics.

Kushmerick will use a variety of measurements and technologies for analysis leading to an integration of human limb muscle function. Human limb muscle will provide an exemplar for the integrated human function team. The analysis and modeling of different cell types and tissues in the limb as a functional organ will provide enabling concepts and technology for larger scale modeling of the “digital human” and guide strategies for database and global computer system development.

This integrated understanding is essential to predict potential problems, simulate health conditions and plan adequate responses to situations that might occur. To develop modeling approaches to the body’s highly organized systems, initial research will focus on heart and skeletal muscle from the molecular to system level. Spin-offs of this and the following project ought to have a big impact on healing and sports medicine on earth.

P. Bryant Chase, UW research associate professor of radiology, has a project concerning the cell and molecular biomechanics of cardiac and skeletal muscles. His goal is to produce a muscle cell model that will explain changes due to activity level and other factors that can then be integrated into computational models of human limb and heart. The essential molecular and subcellular components of the model will be identified and algorithms constructed based on experimental data obtained in a controlled environment. The muscle cell model will be one of the main building blocks for constructing a model of integrated human function because the cell is the basic unit of physiological organization.

Robert Wiseman, UW associate professor of radiology, has a project looking at why astronauts lose muscle mass in space and will search for chemical explanations of why exercise only partly ameliorates this problem. The main approach will be to use information on changes in the calcium ion, which triggers contraction and the mechanical response, to investigate whether that calcium ion also signals longer-term changes in muscle gene expression. If these mechanisms exist, the next step is to design more appropriate exercises in the absence of gravity which are designed to mimic the biochemical signals which occur on earth.