Newswise — LOS ANGELES (May 22, 2025) — The Cedars-Sinai Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute launched the Cedars-Sinai Center for Space Medicine Research on May 22—and marked the occasion with a visit from NASA astronaut and microbiologist Kate Rubins, PhD.
“The Center for Space Medicine Research leverages our expertise in academics, research and clinical medicine and builds on a decade of work in the Regenerative Medicine Institute,” said Arun Sharma, PhD, associate professor of Biomedical Sciences at Cedars-Sinai and director of the new research center. “Space biomedicine is a rapidly emerging field, and we are building a solid body of research into what happens to the human body in space and how stem cells behave in microgravity.”
Cedars-Sinai has sent five experiments on missions to the International Space Station, with more planned beginning in late summer. In addition to space experiments, the new center will establish an educational initiative tied to the Cedars-Sinai Master of Science in Regenerative Medicine program, which includes space biomedicine courses, Sharma said.
“As an academic medical center engaged in disease discovery programs, Cedars-Sinai is not limiting its research to the confines of the Earth’s gravitational field,” said Shlomo Melmed, MB, ChB, executive vice president of Medicine and Health Sciences and dean of the Medical Faculty. “The establishment of this new research center is another step in our great journey of scientific discovery, translational medicine and patient care.”
Rubins, who worked with Sharma in 2016 on the first long-duration cell culture experiment in space, kicked off a seminar series devoted to space biomedicine research with a talk titled “The Next Frontier: Biomedical Research in the Second Space Age.”
Rubins earned a bachelor of science in molecular biology from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and a PhD in cancer biology from Stanford University Medical School’s Biochemistry, Microbiology and Immunology Departments. Throughout her two flights to the International Space Station, she spent 300 days in space and performed four spacewalks.
“We’re at the beginning of the second space age,” Rubins said. “When you lift the weight of gravity off living systems you open up exciting new pathways for discovery. Microgravity gives us physics that we just cannot buy or build on Earth.”
Rubins also stressed the potential of advances made in space to address medical and environmental issues on Earth—including sources of clean water and air and options for remote health care delivery.
Maedeh Mozneb, PhD, a project scientist in the Sharma Lab at Cedars-Sinai, has been named associate director of the center. Mozneb has been instrumental in characterizing effects of low-Earth orbit on stem cell expansion, transfection, reprogramming and differentiation. Additional faculty members include Clive Svendsen, PhD, executive director of the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute, Dhruv Sareen, PhD, associate professor of Biomedical Sciences and chief biomanufacturing officer for the Cedars-Sinai Biomanufacturing Center, and Sonja Schrepfer, MD, PhD, research scientist in the Regenerative Medicine Institute.
“The Center for Space Medicine Research is the latest in a series of new projects and growth we have been pursuing on Earth and in orbit,” Svendsen said. “We are excited about this next step and look forward to new discoveries and to helping educate the next generation of space medicine researchers.”
Sharma noted that the timing—and location—are both ideal for a new space medicine endeavor. Southern California is home to the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, SpaceX and enough aerospace startups in Long Beach to earn it the nickname “Space Beach.”
“People don’t always think of L.A. as an aerospace hub,” Sharma said, “but it is becoming that, and Cedars-Sinai is all in.”
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