NASA/NIH ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH

NASA/NIH ADVISORY COMMITTEE ON BIOMEDICAL AND BEHAVIORAL RESEARCH held its inaugural meeting at NASA headquarters in Washington, DC June 29-30. The 10-member advisory committee, authorized by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the Jan. 25 Federal Register, is charged with providing general advice to the NASA administrator and the director of the National Institutes of Health on cooperation and joint research projects. The committee will conduct peer review of pending projects and make funding recommendations. The next scheduled meeting is Jan. 10-11, 1994 at NIH. The committee is chaired by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center President Charles LeMaistre, MD. Members include Kenneth Baldwin, PhD, University of California-Irvine College of Medicine; Dwain Eckberg, MD, Medical College of Virginia; Adele Boskey, PhD, Cornell University Medical College; American Physiological Society Executive Director Martin Frank, PhD,; Francis Haddy, MD, Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences; Guy McKhann, MD, Johns Hopkins Mind Brain Institute; Fred Turek, PhD, Northwestern University; Marjorie Lees, PhD, Shriver Center for Mental Retardation; and Richard Moxley, MD, University of Rochester. On June 29, the committee reviewed the status of NASA-NIH Cooperative Programs and Projects and recommended joint funding of a Center for the Study of Balance Disorders to be administered by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Diseases and the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases. NASA and NIH will each contribute $500,000 to the center. The committee's first meeting comes on the heels of a June 22 House Science/Space Subcommittee hearing on "health benefits of space station research," which coincided with the House vote to continue funding Space Station Freedom. In opening remarks at the hearing, Subcommittee Chairman Hall (D-Texas) emphasized the importance of the space station and the bioreactor developed as part of the project for the contribution to "research being conducted on tissue repair and regeneration, separation of organic materials, biomedical testing, and development of materials for commercial drug development." Harvard Medical School cancer researcher J. Milburn Jessup, MD, called the NASA space bioreactor "so important." It "is a system that can grow cancer which looks and appears to grow like the patient's cancer, giving us an opportunity to test our treatments on relevant cancer models before we try it on the patient." The benefits an in-space bioreactor were touted by M.D. Anderson Cancer Center researcher Neal Pellis who stated that the "availability of sustained true microgravity in Shuttle missions and on the Space Station offers the prospect of conducting long- term investigations at the level of the intact animal." Long-term studies in space "will reveal critical aspects of immune cell biology that form the basis for the programs to develop genuinely novel approaches to the treatment of human disease."