Scientists, doctors and industry gather in Lisbon to discuss Biomedical Research Beyond Earth
Portuguese Space Agency joins science and medical communities to organise a two-day symposium on how space science improves life on Earth and in Space.
For decades, medicine has asked the same questions about the human body: how it ages, how it defends itself, how it withstands radiation, when its blood turns dangerous. Space asks the same questions, amplifying them to a whole new level. Weightlessness ages the body faster, radiation strikes unshielded cells, and immobility promotes blood clot formation. What is learned out there comes back to the clinic here on Earth, and what is learned here helps bodies survive out there.
This is the topic the Science and Space Symposium – Biomedical Research Beyond Earth aims to address. On 21 and 22 October, at the Grande Auditório João Lobo Antunes in Lisbon, the event brings Portugal’s life-sciences and clinical researchers into the same room as peers from Europe, the Middle East and the United States. Organised by GIMM (Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine) and GIMM CARE, with the Faculty of Lisbon of the University of Lisbon, the Portuguese Space Agency and the European Space Agency (ESA), it centres on four questions that weigh as heavily in a hospital as in low Earth orbit: ageing, microbiome, radiation and thromboembolism.
Portugal approaches this theme as a country that is already an integral part of the scientific space community. When ESA needed a facility to keep the biological samples that return from its space and analogue missions, it chose GIMM, located in Lisbon. The institute now hosts ESA’s Exploration Biobank, the only facility of its kind in Europe, where blood, saliva and tissue are held at -80ºC. Also, the Symposium happens only a couple of months after the international science and space community reunited in Santa Maria, in the Azores, for the Atlantic Space Hub: Designing the Future of Space conference, where the discussion focused heavily on how to keep bodies healthy beyond Earth.
Now, a diverse group of experts — national investigators and scientists from ESA and beyond, cardiologists and space radiobiologists — will be in Lisbon to compare notes on the same problem: tracing shared lines of research, identifying where Portuguese science can contribute, and opening doors to collaborations.
On the second day, the doors are open to everyone. A public roundtable featuring ESA astronaut Matthias Maurer, scientists, and Portuguese industry will discuss what it takes to keep a human body working beyond our planet.
Check the programme and secure your spot here. Registration is now open.
