Cynthia Van Rompay and Emil Rehnberg
Cardiac models and preservation methods
Online Summer School – Tissue Engineering & Space Medicine
27 August 2025, 10:00–11:00 CEST
About Cynthia Van Rompay
Cynthia Van Rompay is a PhD student at SCK CEN and KU Leuven working on a Frank de Winne FWO-funded project in space radiobiology focused on long-term preservation of organ-on-chips on Earth and in space. She has a master’s degree in Biochemistry and Biotechnology and performed her master thesis at SCK CEN in space biology focused on skin wound healing in space.
About Emil Rehnberg
Emil Rehnberg is a PhD student working at the Belgian Nuclear Research Center (SCK CEN) and Ghent University. His research focuses on developing 3D cardiac models to investigate accelerated cardiac aging in space. Holding a master’s in Engineering Nanoscience, he combines biofabrication and organ-on-chip technologies to advance human tissue modeling for extreme environments.
Q&A
How long would the organoid last without the preservation and with preservation? How long are we trying to make it last?
Thank you for your question. We have kept our organoids for several months in culture. They can possibly be kept for years, as that is reported in literature for similar models. In this project, our goal is to bridge the launch time of a space mission, so therefore seven to fourteen days would be ideal. In the future, it would be nice to have a method to preserve them for months to years, but we are not there yet.
Have you considered using orgnoid yet?
While we do perform work using other models, all of the work that we presented today are using cardiac organoids.
Are you designing these cardioids with future perspectives of enhacing the efficiency in the finding of new drug candidates too?
Yes, we do hope and belive that these models could be used to better predict good drug candidates in the future. More and more advanced 3D models are helping us do that nowadays and we believe that the accelerated aging caused by the space environment can further help with this.