Hi, my name is Lorenzo Morroni, and I am the coordinator of PULSE. In PULSE, we specifically focus on the heart as an organ, and we are going to use advanced bio fabrication technologies, in particular bioprinting, to create cardiac models that we can use to study cardiac aging.

So the aging of our heart, we are going to do that in a not very straightforward manner. In fact, we are going to use space up in the air or above, actually the air as a sort of accelerator of what normally would take years on Earth to get actually older when on Earth, actually, you would typically see aging processes taking years in space due to the lack of gravity due to microgravity exposure and to the exposure to cosmic radiation, you actually can get older way much faster.

The ultimate idea would be to then provide such a model as a tool, for example, to pharma companies that one day could test their drugs, for example, anti-aging drugs or drugs that can reduce the speed of us getting older with this technology and then hopefully get more predictive and reliable results compared to animal testing, which typically do not correlate 1 to 1 to our biology and our physiology.