The European Space Agency (ESA) and
researchers from academia and industry in Germany, Italy and
Switzerland will sign a contract for a health research project
which will lay the scientific and industrial foundations for the
development of a space bioreactor for biomedical applications to
be set up on the International Space Station.
A bioreactor is a cultivation
vessel used in research laboratories and industrial production to
grow bacteria, yeast or animal cells and, increasingly in the
recent past, tissues. The one to be developed under this contract
will be designed specifically for mammalian cell cultivation and
will be used on the International Space Station to study the
cultivation of medically relevant cells, tissues and organ-like
structures, with particular emphasis on vessels and cartilage.
Growing tissue samples in vitro,
i.e. in a bioreactor, is currently one of the major goals of
medical research. The principles of in vitro cell culture have
been known for almost 100 years, but only in the last 10 - 20
years has the cultivation of mammalian cultures increased
significantly, leading to the creation of the discipline of tissue
engineering. Space research has potential to give a boost to
tissue engineering. As compared to the normal gravity conditions
on Earth, a weightlessness environment may provide much better
conditions for obtaining proper three-dimensional cell structures.
The modular space bioreactor for
growing medically relevant organ-like structures proposed by a
European scientific and industrial research team under the
coordination of Prof. Augusto Cogoli from the Swiss Federal
Technical University in Zurich will play an essential part in
clarifying cellular and molecular mechanisms responsible for cell
aggregation and differentiation control mechanisms and also in
obtaining better pseudo-organs for possible clinical uses. Prof.
Cogoli's team comprises members from Switzerland, Italy and
Germany: Dr Isabelle Walther from the Swiss Federal Technical
University, Zurich, Dr Werner Muller from the Sulzer Medica
company in Winterthur, Prof. Saverio Ambesi-Impiombato from the
University of Udine, Dr Augustinus Bader from the Medical
University of Hannover, Prof. Peter Bruckner from the University
of Munster and Dr Ralf Pörtner from the Technical University of
Hamburg-Harburg. 
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