Show Notes
This episode continues our series of episodes on space biology and #SpaceOmics with Dr. Tejaswini Mishra. Dr. Mishra introduces The NASA Twins Study, a cornerstone scientific work where two twin astronauts were monitored, with one twin traveling to space, and one staying on earth. Dr. Mishra explains the importance of studying long term spaceflight missions, how The NASA Twins Study was set up in a particularly great way to study spaceflight impact, the many different types of data collected and analyzed, and some of the results found by the study.
During the episode, Dr. Mishra explains many of the types of data collected such as microbiome and telomere data. After covering the types of data, we explore some of the main results such as the first ever test of a vaccination in space. Dr. Mishra then explains more in depth on changes seen during spaceflight such as telomere length, gene expression, DNA damage, cognitive function, and more. We discuss how concerning the various changes that occur in space could be for astronauts, such as becoming hypoxic. Dr. Mishra also explains pointers to the kinds of things we should focus on when we go deeper into space for understanding the impact on the human body. Finally, we summarize the main messages of the paper and hear Dr. Mishra’s thoughts on the future of space research.
The NASA Twins Study can be found at: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/364/6436/eaau8650
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This episode discusses Dr. Tejaswini Mishra’s recent publication in Nature Biomedical Engineering: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41551-020-00640-6 Dr. Mishra begins the episode by explaining the origin story of this work and how the idea for this paper came to be. She then explains how this study enrolled thousands of participants and used the participants’ smartwatch or wearable device data to detect COVID-19 infections. After explaining how this study began, Dr. Mishra discusses how she and her team came up with two main algorithms for detecting COVID-19 infections from wearables data. Dr. Mishra also discusses the many variables that could be monitored with wearables in addition to standard measures used for predicting illnesses like heart rate. Finally, we hear about the main results of this study including the successful detection of several active COVID-19 infections in study participants. We also hear a comparison of this work against the COVID-19 wearables study featured previously on the podcast. We end by hearing Dr. Mishra’s thoughts on the future of wearables for detecting infectious diseases and for improving human health in general.