From the International Space Station, Rayana Bernawi, the Saudi astronaut, began yesterday (Thursday) 5/25/2023 working on scientific experiments of King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, at exactly 4:30 pm Saudi time.
The experiments that are carried out using the Live Experiment Fund, last for four days, and are supervised by Dr. Khaled Abu Khabar and Dr. Wejdan Al-Ahmadi, by following up on the workflow, via live broadcast from the BioServe Center for Space Technology, which cooperates with NASA – Colorado – Boulder, and from Riyadh, Dr. Edward Hitti.
These experiments go through several stages, where the first stage takes place by preparing live cells in special containers, and keeping them in a cell incubator for 48 hours to adapt to the conditions of microgravity.
In the second stage, the cells are prepared for a phase before stimulating inflammatory reactions by adding compounds with therapeutic properties to inhibit enzymes that stimulate the production of proteins that cause a number of inflammatory and tumor diseases.
The third stage is completed by adding a catalyst for inflammatory reactions to stimulate biological reactions in the cell. In the fourth stage, samples are collected and preserved at different times, ranging from half an hour to twenty hours, part of which is after chemical treatment to measure the age of the reporter RNA.
In conjunction with the experiments that will take place on the space station (microgravity), Dr. Wijdan Al-Ahmadi will conduct the same experiments on Earth (great gravity) in a NASA laboratory, then a detailed and comprehensive analysis of these samples will be conducted and compared to each other before and after using treatments on them.
These experiments aim to study the effect of some treatments on inflammatory conditions, increase knowledge of the biological changes that occur in the space environment, and reveal the progression of pathological processes. With the aim of early preventive and curative purposes.
