Millie Hughes-Fulford

First Appeared Monday, 13 January '03

VA Research Heads for Space

As an astronaut, Millie Hughes-Fulford drew her own blood in space to perform experiments on gravity’s affect on the human immune system. Later this month, she will oversee research at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Hughes-Fulford will be directing the crew of the space shuttle Columbia through a series of experiments using blood-bank donations and a host of solutions she and members of her lab have prepared.

Hughes-Fulford, director of the Laboratory of Cell Growth at the San Francisco VA Medical Center (SFVAMC) and UCSF professor of medicine, will be collaborating with European Space Agency researcher Augusto Cogoli, a prinicipal investigator on her 1991 shuttle flight.

Known as “Space Shuttle mission STS-107,” January’s flight is devoted entirely to research in biology, physics and chemistry. The seven-member crew will perform more than 80 experiments aboard the shuttle, including the ones directed by Hughes-Fulford and Cogoli.

The 16-day mission is set to begin with the launch, planned for January 16. Hughes-Fulford and members of her lab spent the first week of 2003 packing up their lab at SFVAMC and sending the necessary equipment and supplies to their temporary lab at the space center to arrive in Florida a week before lift-off.

Scientists have known for more than 20 years that microgravity depresses the immune system, Hughes-Fulford said. “In 1977, NASA reported that the T-cells of Apollo astronauts didn’t respond normally to being challenged,” she said. Later, Cogoli showed that this was not due to some systemic change but to changes in the T-cells themselves.

“We’ll be trying to get at the very mechanism behind this observation,” Hughes-Fulford said.

T-cells are the immune system’s first line of defense against foreign invaders such as bacteria or viruses. The triggering of an immune response by a T-cell depends on the secretion of a protein called interleukin-2 (IL-2), the expression of the receptor for IL-2, and the binding of the two.

Hughes-Fulford predicts that microgravity inhibits the expression of the IL-2 receptor.

Her experiments involve the addition of an activator to blood samples containing T-cells by the shuttle crew. The crew will then test for the expression of the gene that encodes for the IL-2 receptor using gene chips.

Understanding the mechanism of T-cell activation will help researchers understand normal activity of the immune system on Earth and offer a better understanding of what goes wrong during the onset of autoimmune and other diseases.

Source: Camille Mojica Rey