COSMOS
Comprehensive Organ System Modeling in Outer Space
Solicitation Status: Submissions Under Review. ARPA-H is reviewing proposals submitted to this initiative's solicitation and are no longer accepting new submissions. Awards will be announced after negotiations are complete.
What if we could accelerate drug discovery and reduce treatment costs by experimenting on rapidly aging tissues in space?
The Problem
- Today’s treatments for aging target symptoms, not underlying age-related changes in function. Regenerative medicines that reverse disease and restore or regenerate healthy tissue are beyond our current capabilities.
- Diseases of the heart, brain, kidney, and reproductive organs create a growing burden on our healthcare system that drug development pipelines are slow to defeat.
- Current preclinical models do not adequately capture the biology of human aging. This gap significantly slows treatments across the development timeline from discovery to approved therapy, delaying patient care.
- While microgravity in low Earth orbit (LEO) provides a unique environment to study extreme conditions on human tissue types, it's unclear if accelerated aging (over weeks versus years) takes place in space.
The Solution
- The Comprehensive Organ System Modeling in Outer Space (COSMOS) initiative focuses on quantifying the Tissue Aging Rate in Space (TARIS) relative to the Tissue Aging Rate on Earth (TAROE) for human tissues (brain, heart, uterine, and kidney) affiliated with the highest morbidity and mortality conditions across multiple adult age groups in the United States.
- The program aims to definitively prove or disprove an accelerated aging rate in LEO across these four critical tissues by using microphysiological systems (organs-on-chips) and organoids.
- If successful, COSMOS will:
- determine if exposure to microgravity in LEO accelerates tissue aging across these tissue types and representative adult age brackets, and, if so,
- create an entirely new first-in-class platform for fully autonomous, high-throughput drug screening in LEO.
- The COSMOS platform will allow the public and private sector to leverage age-accelerated models for faster, less costly, more potent regenerative therapies.
Only ARPA-H can...
- build and establish the U.S. as the leader in the LEO biotechnology domain by convening seemingly disparate technologies across in vitro models, autonomous research and development hardware, new launch vehicles, and biopharma.
- generate downstream pharmaceutical and private interest and investment to create a sustainable pathway for drug testing and, ultimately, manufacturing and clinical trials in space.
Program Manager
"There are no targeted therapies to mitigate or reverse age-related diseases in the heart, brain, uterus, or kidney – organs tied to the highest morbidity and mortality. Even if there were, the pipeline from drug discovery to approved therapy is often protracted and cost prohibitive. But what if we could accelerate tissue aging, cutting the time and costs needed to develop breakthrough regenerative therapies? Surprisingly, the answers to that question rest in outer space – specifically Low Earth Orbit (LEO). COSMOS aims to create a first-in-class R&D platform that will definitively prove or disprove an accelerated aging rate in those high disease burden tissues in the largest, most powerful LEO experiments in human history. For any tissues that age at an accelerated rate, the COSMOS platform will be leveraged by public and private entities to expedite the regenerative therapeutic development pipeline, bringing less costly breakthroughs to patients faster. Humankind deserves a better path to revolutionary regenerative therapies. COSMOS is the giant leap towards that future.”