PITTSBURGH — Jason Gomes enrolled in Community College of Allegheny County to study biotechnology. Until this fall, he hadn't thought about sending cancer into space — or sending anything into space.
Yet here he is, doing pre-experiments, procuring the live cancer cells of an African clawed frog, planning to fly to Cape Canaveral in Florida to watch a Space X Dragon vessel carrying his experiment blast off for the International Space Station sometime later this year.
"It's been pretty crazy," he said, in an understatement of galactic proportions.
Gomes and fellow CCAC student Daniel Roth heard the news late last year that their experiment was picked to go to the International Space Station. They had bested other teams from CCAC and students from across the country competing in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program, now in its 17th mission.
The program is designed to get school and college students engaged in hands-on science research on microgravity — a state of very little gravitational pull that makes astronauts appear to be floating in space.
The International Space Station floats some 250 miles above the earth's surface, orbiting the planet at a breezy 17,500 miles per hour. Inside it, half a dozen astronauts live and work for months at a time.
The question that Gomes' and Roth's experiment hopes to answer is whether spending that much time in space — in microgravity — increases the cancer risk for these astronauts.
"Geez, I would like to know the answer to that question before I get on a Jeff Bezos rocket and go into space," said Justin Starr, CCAC endowed professor of advanced technologies who spearheaded CCAC's effort in the competition.
The students focused on dormant cancer cells and what makes them switch into active mode to cause cancer.
"The most direct impact would be that space travel could directly impact cancer cell proliferation by accelerating cancer formation in astronauts whose bodies harbor dormant cancer cells," Gomes and Roth wrote in their project proposal. "More indirectly, if microgravity has a significant impact on the dormancy/proliferation cycle, this indicates that physical cues in the microenvironment are more important than previously suspected and should be prioritized in future cancer research."
To put this to the test, Gomes and Roth first needed to find the right cells to send to space. They settled on the African clawed frog, whose disease cells closely mimic human cells and whose cells can be kept at ambient temperature.
African clawed frogs, or their molecular parts, are actually frequent space travelers. Soviet scientists first loaded them aboard a space shuttle in 1975. In 1994, female frogs were sent into space to see if gravity is necessary for ovulation and embryonic development. (It's not.)
Over the years, scientists recorded mostly reversible changes to their tails, their ability to swim, and their behavior after being in microgravity. Some of these findings, along with decades of human body research — a cool example is the 2019 NASA's Twin Study, which compared astronaut Scott Kelly while he was in space for a year, to his identical twin brother, astronaut Mark Kelly — have informed NASA's preparations for longer space missions. The agency is shooting for the Moon (again) and Mars, which would require astronauts to be in microgravity for years, instead of months.
Gomes and Roth will be parting with one rubber tube filled with frog cancer cells sometime this summer when it is loaded into the space ship. Another will remain on Earth as a control.
The mission is expected to take between four and six weeks. When the space capsule returns to the surface, the CCAC team will rush to analyze both samples, looking at changes in the cancer cells between space-traveling and the homebody tubes.
They hope to publish their results in a scientific journal and present their findings at a conference at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
