Burn Lab In Space

Dr. Jeffrey Shupp and his colleagues have been awarded space and resources to complete a study of wound healing on the International Space Station (ISS). The Firefighters’ Burn and Surgical Research Laboratory (FBSRL) uses an optimized splinted mouse wound model and offered to adapt it to (ISS) conditions to investigate the effect of microgravity on wound healing in collaboration with the US Army Center for Environmental Health Research (USACEHR).

The proposal the groups co-authored was used to brief the Space Experiment Review Board (SERB) at the Department of Defense (DoD) in August 2017. The proposal was approved by SERB then it went through another review by the Center of Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) and most recently, a slot for the project was allocated in the Rodent Research Mission 8 (RR8) in 2019.

The goal of the study is to explore the impact of microgravity on wound healing and characterize affected biological events; results will provide new insights about events that can be avoided or employed to improve wound healing outcomes in both gravity (earth) and microgravity (space) conditions.