A trip to outer space can wreak havoc on the human body.
Muscles atrophy, bones become porous and immune systems degrade in low gravity.
These effects, as frightening as they may sound, tend to be temporary. Astronauts returning from extended stays at the International Space Station mostly recover within a few months.
With initial funding of $25 million, the University of Pittsburgh’s new Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Biomedicine aims to study the medical challenges that occur in space to improve human health on Earth.
“That combination, the rapid onset and recovery in otherwise very healthy people, gives us a powerful window into aging, chronic disease and resilience,” Kate Rubins, a Pitt professor and the institute’s founding director, said during a press conference Thursday. “And it allows us to see biological mechanisms that are slow or hidden on Earth.”
Rubins, a NASA astronaut for 16 years and the first person to sequence DNA in space, is leading the institute alongside geneticist, space biologist and Pitt professor of surgery Chris Mason. Together, the longtime collaborators embody the university’s strengths in cutting-edge science and medicine.
Ashok Trivedi, the institute’s namesake, is providing much of the $25 million, with the rest coming from the university. His contribution underpins the creation of the first center of its kind in the country.
The Pittsburgh-based entrepreneur and philanthropist is a physicist by training. But since the roughly $4 billion sale of his information technology firm IGATE in 2015, he’s turned his attention toward what he believes is science’s most fruitful frontier.
“Physics has reached a level of creative maturity, while at the same time biological sciences are bubbling with youthful excitement,” Trivedi said. “That’s why I believe this coming century belongs to biological sciences.”
The institute is pursuing scientific breakthroughs on how microgravity and radiation — another hazard of space — effect cell growth and disease progression. But they’re also looking to apply experiences of diagnosing and treating maladies in space to other limited-resource environments, like rural communities and disaster zones.
For instance, astronauts have pioneered the use of handheld ultrasound machines with guidance from remote technicians — a process that could be replicated in places where sonographers are scarce.
The institute is starting with a nucleus of Northeastern universities, including Carnegie Mellon University, but has ambitions of becoming a global network. Research merging spaceflight and medicine has historically been concentrated in California, Florida and Texas, according to Mason.
It’s also working on agreements with NASA to use its testing facilities and commercial spaceflight companies to take experiments into orbit. Missions and projects are planned into the 2030s.
Pitt has already carved out a role in the field of spaceflight through its Pitt Space initiative, which was founded in 2024 under the leadership of Afshin Beheshti with a focus on engineering, computations and geology. The centers will coexist and collaborate.
Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for the health sciences at Pitt, credited Beheshti’s work for inspiring the university to dedicate a whole institute to studying space — not just a single laboratory.
“It all came together and then with the generous donor, now we had the resources to actually recruit great talent and build it at a bigger scale,” Shekhar said.