Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 176, Muscles on Chips in Space.

I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, astronauts,

all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight.

Now, long-time listeners may remember when we chatted with Dr Lucy Lowe

from the National Institute of Health about

organs on chips in space. We talked about this technology that's about the size of a thumb

drive that mimics the structure and function of human tissues and organs.

That was episode 70 for those that want to check it out, which now that I think about was

more than 100 episodes ago. Wow, time flies. Well, this kind of technology has brought a

number of investigations to space since then. Just recently, the SpaceX

Falcon 9 rocket delivered the Dragon Cargo vehicle on the CRS 21 mission to the International

Space Station, bringing up a ton of science with it. Literally like a ton, 2,000 pounds of

science, actually a bit more. Now part of that mass was dedicated to tissue chips for an

investigation called, or at least informally, human muscle on a chip. So on today's

podcast, we're going to talk about this investigation, the

tissue chip technology, and the story of how this investigation went from paper to

low-worth orbit. Our guest today is Dr. Chavan Malaney, president of

MicroGRX, an associate Professor at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy.

So here we go.

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