30 Apr 2025
What happens to the body in zero gravity? What consequences does this have for medicine on Earth? These questions were the focus of an international workshop at LMU Hospital, which discussed new findings in space medicine.
The three-day workshop marked the start of an intensified research collaboration between LMU Hospital, the National Research Council (NRC), and universities in Quebec and Ontario, Belgium, and Germany. Prof. Alexander Choukér, Dr. Dominique Moser, and Marina Tuschen from the Department of Anesthesiology organized the Bavarian-NRC-funded workshop together with Prof. Teodor Veres from Montreal. The aim is to use microfluidic chips to facilitate the monitoring of various human organ systems, as well as life support systems (e.g., water treatment), and to make it more reliable. The project has been funded by the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for three years and has received start-up funding from the Bavarian Research Alliance (BayFOR).
Space research for tomorrow's medicine
Weightlessness profoundly changes the human body: bodily fluids shift to the upper body, which in turn affects the brain, and the cardiovascular system must also reorganize itself. These processes increase the risk of blood clots, not in the legs as in humans on Earth, but in the necks of astronauts – an aspect that has been neglected for far too long in space research.
"Research into these processes is not only important for space travel, but can also provide insights for people on Earth, for example in cases of immobility or perioperatively," says PD Dr. Judith-Irina Buchheim, project manager for current ISS projects, who addressed this topic in one of the sessions and described the importance of the immune system. Research is already being conducted in this area, for example on brown bears in hibernation or on humans in extreme living conditions. However, further research in space would be extremely important in order to bring together these cross-organ findings.
‘The workshop is an important part of our collaboration,’ says organiser Prof. Alexander Choukér, who heads Research Laboratory I ‘Translational Research Stress and Immune System’ at the LMU Medical Centre's Department of Anaesthesiology. ‘This is because it alternates between lively debates and short interdisciplinary keynote speeches, which, in addition to medical topics, also cover important aspects of biology (represented by Dean Prof. Herwig Stibor) and engineering (Prof. Gisela Detrell, TUM).’
The space agencies from Canada, Germany (DLR) and Europe (ESA) were also represented with presentations on their current programmes. The collaboration is to be further expanded. A scientific consortium is currently being planned to help implement EU applications.