The call was broad: Submit a student-led research experiment to NASA, which will assign an astronaut to conduct the experiment in space. Two Community College of Allegheny County students answered the challenge — and now their proposal has been selected as one of three in the country that will be carried out aboard the International Space Station.
Jason Gomes and Daniel Roth will send a test tube with dormant cancer cells to the station, where an astronaut will add a fixative chemical to stop decay in half of the cells. That biological moment in time could reveal a few things when the treated cells are compared to those remaining.
“There’s a lot of interesting things we can look at with those living cells,” said CCAC Biology professor Francis Cartieri. The cells “could be re-implanted into a frog to see if they grow a tumor in a different way. We could look at all of the different factors that are associated with dormancy and activation, and see if there’s differences from our duplicate tube that we grow on earth.”
Ultimately, the goal is to determine if the environment that astronauts are exposed to affects dormant cancer cells in any way. While there hasn’t been a study of this kind before, there’s some evidence that microgravity accelerates cancer formation and the proliferation of dormant cells.
“My thinking is that the cancer cells are actually going to grow faster," Roth said. "How much faster? We’ll see."
Roth is studying respiratory therapy while Gomes is in the college’s biotechnology program. Gomes re-entered the education system a couple of years ago and said this experiment is not something that he expected in community college.
The program is part of the National Center for Earth and Space Science Education’s work with NASA to use the International Space Station as a national laboratory. A total of 37 K-12 and college-level groups in the U.S., Canada and Ukraine are participating in the Student Spaceflight Experiments Program.
Cartieri mentors Gomes and Roth on the project and said that for him, it emphasized the need for more student involvement in the scientific community.
“Just learning and repeating the same old experiments that you find in a lab manual … you aren’t learning anything new," he said. "You can’t get a surprising result. And half of the science that’s really fascinating is the discovery part, where you don’t know what to expect and you get to be creative and you get to compete in a scientific community and share with each other."
