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<\/a>\nThe International Space Station, where the muscle wasting studied by Dr Kamal’s team plays out in orbit, a challenge that grows as missions push on towards the Moon and Mars (Credit: NASA)<\/p>\n
The work belongs to Dr Khaled Kamal, who joined Iowa State in 2024 after more than a decade working on projects connected to the European Space Agency and NASA. Kamal studies how microgravity disrupts the signalling pathways that keep muscle healthy, processes with names like mechanotransduction, the way cells sense and respond to physical force, alongside redox biology and intercellular communication within the musculoskeletal system. His central focus is muscle atrophy, the wasting that astronauts experience on long duration missions to the International Space Station and that will only become a greater concern as crews venture further, towards the Moon and eventually Mars. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe try to understand how spaceflight induces this muscle atrophy at the molecular and cellular level, the payoff is practical as much as scientific, understand the mechanism, and a countermeasure becomes possible,\u201d – Dr Khaled Kamal from Iowa State University<\/p>\n
Recreating weightlessness on Earth is, naturally, rather difficult, so Kamal\u2019s lab built something rather clever! Iowa State\u2019s first hindlimb unloading rodent model that mimics some of the physical conditions of microgravity without leaving the ground. Suspending an animal so its hind limbs bear no load effectively silences that same conversation between muscle and gravity, letting researchers watch in real time how muscle tissue senses the change and begins to respond, and giving them a testbed for therapies designed to preserve muscle health when that gravitational signal disappears.<\/p>\n
What makes the research valuable well beyond the space programme is that the body does not particularly care why gravity\u2019s signal has gone quiet. The molecular pathways disrupted in microgravity overlap substantially with those involved in age related sarcopenia and Duchenne muscular dystrophy, a genetic condition that breaks down muscle from childhood. Kamal is now hunting for new biomarkers, including extracellular vesicle signatures and mechanosensitive signalling systems, that could one day underpin monitoring tools and treatments for astronauts on long missions to the Moon and Mars, and equally for patients on Earth.<\/p>\n