BREVARD COUNTY, Fla. — As humans venture farther and farther out into space, having the ability to tackle increasingly complex medical problems will become more important, scientists say

That’s one of the reasons NASA partnered with the Methuselah Foundation’s New Organ Alliance for the Vascular Tissue Challenge. The competition was announced in 2016, and a winner was announced Wednesday.

The goal of the competition was to “successfully create thick, human vascularized organ tissue in an in-vitro environment while maintaining metabolic functionality similar to their in-vivo native cells throughout a 30-calendar day survival period.” 

Of the 19 teams from across the country that registered for the competition, separate teams from the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) in Winston-Salem, N.C., won the top two spots. 

They competed individually as Team Winston and Team WFIRM and used different approaches to creating lab-grown human liver tissues. They received $300,000 and $100,000, respectively.

“The fact that this team (Team Winston) was able to reach this accomplishment is not surprising," said Mike Roberts, the interim chief scientist for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS). "The fact that their two teams came in first and second, that was surprising.” 

Roberts was one of several judges from across the country for the competition, which is part of the Centennial Challenges based at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.

CASIS, which is based in Melbourne, Fla., is a nonprofit organization that manages the International Space Station (ISS) U.S. National Laboratory.

“This challenge fell into one of those areas where we’ve been very actively working with the National Institute of Health, the National Science Foundation and commercial companies to further tissue engineering as a technology that can benefit us here on Earth,” Roberts said. “And it turns out, one of the challenges that we have, this vascularization, the ability to make thick tissues, it’s going to be a challenge for NASA too.”

Graduate student Kelsey Willson said she and the other members of Team Winston were ecstatic to win the challenge, which comes with a $300,000 prize and a trip for their research to the ISS. 

“It certainly is a first step, and one of the next goals is taking this and possibly moving on to something bigger than a centimeter,” Willson said.

The amount of funding larger research firms can bring to these types of competitions makes it difficult for some of the smaller competitors, according to Dr. Kunal Mitra, who helped lead Team Bioprinter from the Florida Institute of Technology. 

Florida Tech will continue with its work and will partner with other institutions, like the University of Central Florida, with the goal of eventually having something they can send to the ISS, Mitra said.

"We know that right now, we’re not on the domain right now to compete in the 30-days, six-month challenges," he said. "However, if we can come out and say that our quality of tissue is good, we’re getting good RNA, you can do a lot of biochemical analysis." 

“So, we took that niche right now, looking at the quality of the tissue, of the bioprinted tissue, and see if we can get a niche compared to others. So, we’re looking at that angle.”

Even though another commercial resupply mission, CRS-23, is coming up in a couple of months, Roberts said it will take at least a year for Team Winston to do the necessary ground work to be able to send their experiment up to the ISS.

“Cell science is not easy. It’s a science, but it’s also an art, the ability to cultivate and maintain these cells in a laboratory environment,” Roberts said. “It’s made more difficult because of microgravity. You have to design devices that can operate in that environment, and that’s usually a more complicated challenge than even trying to keep these cell cultures alive in a 1G environment.”

Once the research advances to that point, it could have crucially important implications in the field of tissue engineering, both for those in space as well as us here on Earth, Roberts said.