Medications are an integral part of space flight crew health, used to treat space motion sickness, headaches, sleeplessness, backaches, and nasal congestion among many other acute and chronic ailments during missions. With extended-duration missions on the International Space Station, and planned expeditions to the Moon and Mars, pharmaceuticals will be used for the treatment of illness and infections in addition to their use in tandem with other countermeasures to augment cardiovascular conditioning, musculoskeletal integrity, and immune response. The goal of the Pharmacotherapeutics Laboratory is to mitigate risk by identifying and providing safe and effective diagnostics tools, pharmaceutical preparations, therapeutic procedures and intervention strategies to enable successful space medical operations.
The Pharmacotherapeutics Laboratory, in close collaboration with the Space Medicine and Health Care Systems Office, supports medical requirements for the Shuttle, International Space Station, and space exploration programs. Current activities include clinical pharmacy services, clinical pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics research, therapeutic drug monitoring, specialized therapeutic monitoring for spaceflight-related pathophysiology, novel dosage form development, and pharmaceutical stability assessment.
The laboratory capabilities include but are not limited to the following activities:
- FDA clinical trial implementation
- Clinical pharmacotherapeutics research
- Construction and maintanance of international drug equivalency database
- Medications database maintenance for Shuttle, International Space Station and future expeditions to Moon and Mars
- Development of novel formulations and compound delivery technology
- Assessment of drug stability and efficacy using USP methods
- Development and validation of diagnostic and intervention strategies and products
Current research projects in progress include:
- Comparison of the bioavailability and performance effects using different dosage forms of anti-motion sickness medications in human subjects
- FDA clinical trials of intranasal formulation of scopalamine
- Development of microencapsulated promethazine dosage forms, pre-clinical trials
- Evaluation of gastrointestinal function monitoring strategies
- Stability of pharmaceuticals in space and in simulated space flight environment
- Development of novel technologies for online chemical analysis and long-term sample storage
- Development of pharmaceutical bioinformatics tools for use during space mission or in harsh environments
- Development of cognitive assessment tools for use in pharmacodynamic clinical studies