Wyss Institute-enabled Organ Chip “avatars” will provide insights into astronaut health risks and provide a tool for future discovery of countermeasures necessary for travel to the Moon and beyond
By Alexandra Jirstrand
(BOSTON) – Launched on April 1, 2026, Artemis II is a historic, approximately 10-day lunar flyby mission that is sending four astronauts farther into space than any humans have traveled since the Apollo era, marking a critical step toward sustained lunar exploration and future missions to Mars.
The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University is playing a pivotal role in the Artemis mission through its groundbreaking contributions to the AVATAR (A Virtual Astronaut Tissue Analog Response) investigation.
Transforming space medicine with “avatars” of human biology
The AVATAR experiment could represent a paradigm shift in how space agencies study human health risks beyond Earth’s protective magnetosphere by leveraging human Organ Chip technology developed at the Wyss Institute and commercialized by Emulate, Inc. Organ Chips are small devices the size of a USB thumb drive that contain tiny hollow channels lined with living human cells that mimic organ-level functions.
For the Artemis II mission, cells derived from the astronauts have been harvested to create Bone Marrow Chips, which are traveling beside the crew aboard the Orion spacecraft, while another set remains on Earth, to assess how their responses to spaceflight conditions affect human biology within each of the astronauts. Microgravity and cosmic radiation are two of the most significant hazards of deep space travel. The bone marrow was chosen for this mission because it is particularly vulnerable to radiation and it is the source of circulating blood cells, which have been found to be altered in some astronauts following spaceflight. After the mission, researchers will compare the two sets of Organ Chips to assess how radiation and microgravity affect bone marrow blood-forming cells and compare these findings to analyses of astronaut blood samples collected before and after flight.
From the Moon to Mars and back to Earth
One goal of the AVATAR project is to provide proof-of-concept for including human Organ Chips on future missions to assess the effects of radiation, microgravity, and other aspects of spaceflight on the human body. Current approaches are limited because only a few astronauts fly at once, and medical analyses rely on blood samples that are collected before or after the mission. If the AVATAR project is successful, larger numbers of Organ Chips could be included on future flights to increase sample numbers and thus, obtain more accurate assessments of the medical risks that astronauts experience on longer-term space missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. Human Organ Chips also could be used to understand the molecular mechanisms that underlie changes induced by spaceflight and to develop countermeasure therapies to mitigate health risks on long-duration missions.
“This technology could be game-changing for NASA, and for medicine on Earth,” shares Dr. Lisa Carnell, NASA’s Director of the Biological and Physical Sciences Division. “It could enable us to personalize medical kits for astronauts on future deep-space missions, as well as impact patient care right here on Earth.”
“Artemis II is not only a milestone in human exploration, it’s also taking a major step forward towards understanding and protecting human health while in deep space,” said Wyss Institute Founding Director Donald Ingber, M.D., Ph.D., who is the Principal Investigator on the AVATAR project at the Wyss. “By sending patient-specific ‘avatars’ of astronaut tissues into space, we can study risks in a personalized way never before possible. If successful, Organ Chip technology could help NASA develop countermeasures that protect space explorers from potential life-threatening hazards in the future. Insights into how radiation and microgravity affect our bodies, as well as discovery of therapies that protect against these effects, can also improve medicine here on Earth.”
Artemis II is not only a milestone in human exploration, it’s also taking a major step forward towards understanding and protecting human health while in deep space,
A new era of human exploration and biomedical discovery
This mission underscores the power of interdisciplinary collaboration between NASA, academia, and industry to confront one of humanity’s greatest challenges: how to safely extend our presence beyond Earth to distant planets. As Artemis II astronauts journey hundreds of thousands of miles from Earth and swing around the Moon, the Wyss Institute’s technologies are enabling a new era of “human avatars” in space – bringing biology into the forefront of space exploration.
AVATAR is led by NASA, in collaboration with other U.S. government agencies, including the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), which is part of the National Institutes of Health. Commercial partner Space Tango developed the hardware to enable the automated experiment aboard using organ chips that were manufactured by Emulate Inc., with Wyss Principal Scientist David Chou, M.D., Ph.D., leading the research teams at the Wyss Institute and Emulate, Inc. that are carrying out these studies. The project at the Wyss Institute is supported in part with federal funds from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services; Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response; BARDA, under contract number 75A50123D00004 75A50123F61002.