NASA awards Medical College $1.8M grant to study astronaut heart risk

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The Medical College of Wisconsin's John Baker will lead the study for NASA.

Rich Kirchen

Senior Reporter- Milwaukee Business Journal

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With NASA planning human space missions that would require astronauts to live for prolonged periods outside the earth's protective atmosphere, the agency has awarded a $1.8 million grant to the Medical College of Wisconsin to determine the risk of developing degenerative heart disease from exposure to space radiation.

The primary investigator for the four-year grant will be John Baker, a professor of cardiothoracic surgery at the Wauwatosa-based college and an investigator at the Children's Hospital of Wisconsin Research Institute.

The project includes developing a model of disease progression, which will help determine at what levels and at what duration radiation damage would occur, the Medical College said.

NASA's future missions might include trips to an asteroid, the moon or Mars. If those missions are launched, astronauts would be exposed to space radiation from high-energy galactic cosmic rays and lower energy solar particle events.

"We've seen cardiovascular damage in people on earth who have been exposed to high levels of radiation — for example, survivors of the atomic bomb in Japan," Baker said. "As part of this research, we will conduct ground-based studies to assess the increased risk of developing cardiovascular damage in space."

Collaborators on the project include Medical College of Wisconsin professors John Moulder and Dr. Richard Komorowski. Also collaborating will be Amy Kronenberg at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.; John Hopewell at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and Mark Little at the National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Md.

Senior Reporter Rich Kirchen covers health care, sports business, politics and media/advertising for the Milwaukee Business Journal.