AstroCardia, a consortium of five Belgian companies and research institutes, will send an artificial heart into space in 2025, De Tijd reports.
The companies and researchers want to study how ageing affects the heart. In space, the process happens faster, allowing researchers to make new discoveries. Cardiovascular disease is still one of the most common causes of death in Europe. This risk increases as we grow older.
The five Belgian entities are pooling their resources together to send the artificial heart to space where they can better understand the effects of this ageing process.
"Our heart changes as we age. It slowly gets bigger and stiffer, the artery calcifies and pumping power drops," explains Hilde Stenuit, project coordinator and researcher at Space Applications Services. "In space, that ageing process occurs 20 times faster due to factors such as stress, microgravity and radiation. We eliminate time there."
Stenuit notes that this allows researchers to achieve data and results about cardiac ageing that would not be possible on earth.
The consortium will create a 'bioprint', a miniature biological hearth on a chip and build an artificial circulatory system around it. This will feed the small artificial heart with oxygen and nutrients. After it matures, it will eventually start to beat and scientists will begin their experiments.
The artificial heart uses bio-printed heart cells and is just a few square millimetres in size. The cells are created using biomaterials and stem cells that are instructed to form specialised cells found in the heart. This bioprinting will take place at Ghent start-up BIO INX.
Credit: Sck Cen
The tests are set to begin in 2025. The heart-on-a-chip will blast off towards the International Space Station (ISS) for 4-6 weeks, where it will be monitored around the clock by researchers back on earth.
The consortium of companies says that the experiment may yield new information to help investigate cardiovascular diseases and develop possible drugs.
