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A San Diego high school senior is a finalist in the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search competition for her research on how astronauts’ wounds might be able to heal.
Leanne Fan, 18, a 12th-grader at Westview High School, built a device that uses rotation to simulate microgravity — the near-weightlessness that astronauts experience in space — in order to study how live organisms grow in space.
Some people use such a device, known as a clinostat, to study how plants might grow in the absence of gravity. But Fan is using it to study how human and worm cells react.
“NASA’s version is around $50,000 commercially, but I looked at the way they built it and the way that it works with the mechanism, and I tried to replicate it with this,” she said.
Fan’s planarian worms, purchased online, react like they’re in constant free-fall when placed inside the device. Over time, the worms are being rotated by the clinostat, so their cells’ sensors can’t catch up.
Astronauts’ wounds don’t heal in orbit the same way they do on earth, which can be dangerous given the limited availability of medical care.
So Fan is testing photobiomodulation — “a very specific kind of red light therapy” — to accelerate the rate of healing, something she said hasn’t previously been tested.
English (US) ·