TISSUE REPAIR AND REGENERATION IN SPACE AND ON EARTH

Repair/regeneration is the process that makes organisms resilient to injuries (trauma, burns, accidental wounds, surgery), allowing survival, restoration of the protective barrier and organism integrity. On Earth, traumatic injury is a major cause of mortality and disability. In addition, millions of surgical wounds are performed annually in the course of routine surgery and medical care. Therefore, defective or delayed wound healing, chronic ulcers and fibrosis are important health and socio-economic problems. future Space exploration programs require long duration missions beyond LEO and hence health emergencies on board cannot be excluded, while medical evacuation times to Earth might become too long and the communication lag would render useless to guide the crew actions remotely. Therefore, medical care planning for future exploration missions should consider emergency surgery and trauma care, and meanwhile studies on repair processes in space are of paramount importance as wound healing is critical to survive trauma or surgery. The experiment “Wound Healing and Sutures in Unloading Conditions”, selected by ESA (ILSRA-2014-0043), aims to study the behavior of “in vitro” sutured wound models in weightlessness (ISS). The findings are expected to increase the knowledge on wound healing in weightlessness, suggest new pathways for tissue engineering, give cues for strategies promoting tissue repair/regeneration and improving the management of defective healing in space and on Earth.Preliminary results are illustrated and discussed