Personalised Medicine Approaches to Space Exploration

Each astronaut is unique and predisposition to physiological changes during spaceflight and response to medicines, both efficacy and toxicity, are dependent on a combination of factors including environment and genetics. Personalised medicine aims to move away from a ‘one-size fits all’ approach to one which uses innovative approaches, such as –omics technologies, to be able to determine individual benefit-risk of drug treatment to ensure the most effective interventions or countermeasures to improve health.

The aims of this Topical Team are to explore how personalised medicine approaches can optimise astronaut drug safety and efficacy and identify risk factors that predispose astronauts to negative effects of space exploration. The medications that are currently available on the ISS are commonly used drugs that have been on the market for a long time. However, in modern medicine, even more effective medicines may be available in terrestrial practice. This Topical Team shall focus on the development of a “future space exploration package” implementing Personalized Medicine for astronauts with the aims to ensure optimal drug treatment in future space exploration journeys and gather scientific evidence on specific gene-space-conditions-interactions that may characterize an astronaut specific benefit-risk profile for drug treatment in space medicine. Identification of personalized susceptibility factors for negative effects of space exploration will enable bespoke countermeasures maximizing astronaut safety and mission success.