The 100 Year Starship Project

Ronke Olabisi is healing wounds without scars and making bone grow from seashells as she works on the 100 Year Starship Project which aims to enable travel beyond our solar system. Learn how Olabisi, UCI associate professor of biomedical engineering, is helping humans stay healthier in space and on Earth.  The 100 Year Starship Project was launched by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Transcript:

[sci fi music]

[sounds of inverted microscope]

NATALIE TSO, HOST: This is The Lab Beat where we take a look at cutting-edge labs at UC Irvine’s engineering school. I'm Natalie Tso. Ronke Olabisi is enabling wounds to heal without scars and making bone grow from seashells. She's an associate professor of biomedical engineering at UC Irvine, and her research is fueled by her desire to go to outer space.

RONKE OLABISI: See, I've wanted to go since I was four years old. I want to be weightless. I've been weightless before. I've gone on a parabolic flight. But I want the whole package. I can't explain what that four year old was thinking because whatever she was thinking, she put this burning desire in me that I've never grown out of it.

TSO: She's a part of NASA's 100 Year Starship Project, which aims to enable travel beyond our solar system within a hundred years.

OLABISI: The 100 Year Starship is more of a thought experiment. If you look back at what they did in getting to the moon. They decided in 1961 we’re going to go to the moon, and in 1969 they landed on the moon. And the explosion of technology...they had to be able to communicate with the astronauts so they developed a communications satellite, and now we all have cell phones that rely on communication satellites.

They needed the astronauts to be protected from the sun, so they invented UV protection and so we have sunglasses because of that. There is something in your life that we owe to going to the moon.

TSO: Now, her lab is working on enabling humans to stay healthier in space and on Earth.

OLABISI: One of the things I work on is bone. Astronauts lose tons of bone in space.

TSO: Astronauts lose at least 1% of their bone density per month in space. This happens on Earth too. Women in midlife can lose over 1% of their bone density a year. But Olabisi has found promise in a solution using seashells that was inspired by an old Mayan jaw.

OLABISI: It was found in the 1930s, and it hung out in a Harvard museum. Everybody saw that three of the teeth were from the shell. The inside of the shell is called nacre — that lustrous mother-of-pearl iridescent part — that's called nacre.

TSO: When seashells make nacre, it's 3000 times stronger than its main ingredient aragonite.

 

OLABISI: This dentist, who in 1972, he saw it and he was like — Can I X-ray that? And so he X-rayed it and he found bony integration into the shells. And so he knew it was tooth implants. If you think about that, I know a lot of people who have had dental implants that have failed. So this lasted thousands and thousands of years — after this person no longer existed, these teeth lasted.

TSO: That sparked a lot of research into nacre. What's great about it is it doesn't get rejected by the human body.

OLABISI: Because if I take a piece of bone from me and put it into you, you're going to reject it. What we're rejecting is that our bones have cells all through them, and the cells have a name tag that say that it’s Ronke’s cells and your cells have a name tag, and they're going to be like “Those aren't. Get out,” right? But with nacre, nacre is completely acellular, and so because of that, you can put it in anything. They put it in sheep, they put it in people and it's not rejected and it promotes integration into it. And it's 3,000 times harder. So it's like this really amazing implant material.

TSO: Her lab has used nacre to direct bone growth, which can help people retain bone density.

OLABISI: And what we're doing with bone is we're using seashell to try to micropattern bone so that it doesn't go where we don't want it to go when we use methods to cause bone growth.

TSO: Her lab has successfully caused bone growth in petri dishes, which she views with this

[sound of inverted microscope]

inverted microscope. She's also made strides in wound healing, which is impaired in space.

[sound of liquid nitrogen being pumped into tank]

OLABISI: So that noise is the liquid nitrogen being pumped into this cryostorage tank.

TSO: That's where all the cells are kept in suspended animation, which is like animal hibernation. The liquid nitrogen instantly freezes whatever it touches because it's -320 degrees Fahrenheit. Her lab took adult stem cells and insulinoma cells to make a major breakthrough in healing wounds.

OLABISI: So we used two different types of cells that are both really powerful wound healing agents. We put them in a hydrogel and we put that on wounds.

[sci fi music]

TSO: The average healing rate is 40 days with scar. Their result was amazing.

OLABISI: It healed in 14 days without scar. What we believe is that when we put the cells together, we primed these cells towards the wound healing, like the difference between Clark Kent's best friend and Superman. We think we really activated them to be super powerful cells.

TSO: The wound healing without scar worked in mice. So the next step is larger animals and then people. Those are just some of the incredible breakthroughs Ronke Olabisi is making at her lab at UC Irvine. We might see her in outer space someday, but for now, she's engineering tissues to make life better for humans in space and on Earth.

I'm Natalie Tso for The Lab Beat which is brought to you by the UC Irvine Samueli School of Engineering.

(Season 1, Episode 3)