Miniature Human Hearts and Brains Launch to Space Station for Aging Study

The tissues flew aboard the commercial resupply mission CRS-35, which lifted off Tuesday morning from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. They are expected to arrive at the station on Thursday.

David Sachs, assistant professor of surgery at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told ABC News that the work matters both for future space crews and for medicine on Earth. "If people are going to be living and working in space, then we need to understand what's going to happen to them," he said. "But also, because it's interesting as a model of accelerated aging for studying people on Earth."

Sachs and Kevin Costa, an associate professor of surgery at the same school, are sending up to 16 miniature hearts to the station to test how the tissue responds to electrical signals and to monitor how it reacts to near-zero gravity. Costa told ABC News that the compressed timeline is the point. "Six months in space ... is equivalent to about 10 to 20 years of aging on Earth," he said.

The hardware, developed by Space Tango and integrated into a miniature laboratory called CubeLab, simulates the natural environment inside the human body. Gentry Barnett, the company's chief technology officer, described it to ABC News as "slightly bigger than a shoebox" and "a fully automated, miniaturized system."

The same mission carries miniature brains, called miBrain, which are about the size of a peppercorn and model both healthy and diseased tissue. Exposing them to the space environment allows scientists to see how they respond and to examine why living in space accelerates aging. The organs are not full-size human organs, but the researchers describe them as good, cost-effective substitutes that take up little of the station's limited room.

Sachs said microgravity also provides a setting that is difficult to reproduce on Earth for studying what happens to people with a sedentary lifestyle or during prolonged bed rest. Joel Blanchard, associate professor of stem cell biology and regenerative medicine and neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told ABC News the research runs in both directions. "[The research is] translating to stuff in space, but it's also translating back to the research we do in the laboratory to help people with Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease," he said.

Lisa Carnell, director of the biological and physical sciences division at NASA, told ABC News the experiments serve as a starting point for future research beyond low Earth orbit, including to the moon and beyond.