With space travel becoming more frequent, a new biomarker tool has been developed by an international team of researchers to help improve the growing field of aerospace medicine and the health of astronauts. Dr. Guy Trudel (Professor in the Faculty of Medicine), Odette Laneuville (Associate Professor, Faculty of Science, and Director of the Biomedical Sciences) and Dr.
Martin Pelchat (Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology) are among the contributors to an international study led by Eliah Overbey of Weill Cornell Medicine and the University of Austin. Published today in Nature , it introduces the Space Omics and Medical Atlas (SOMA), a database of integrated data and sample repository from a diverse range of space missions, including from SpaceX and NASA. Space travel creates cellular, molecular, and physiological shifts in astronauts.
SOMA is expected to provide a much necessary biomedical profiling that can help tease out the short and long-term health impacts of spaceflight. This will bring needed health monitoring, risk mitigation, and countermeasures baseline data for upcoming lunar, Mars, and exploration-class missions. It is meant to help keep astronauts and space travelers alive and healthy.
It may also have some intended use here on Earth. "This represents a breakthrough in the study of human adaptation and life in space. Since many of the changes in astronauts in space resemble those of people who are immobile in bed, thes.
