What’s involved in a clinical trial? │ Sending Worms to Space with Colleen Deane

What is involved in a clinical trial, and how can we test muscle health in people? If you're interested, watch the next video in our series to follow clinical trials being conducted on exercise, ageing and inactivity among people, and find out how they are linked to the Worms in Space research.

Subscribe to this series and watch more episodes on how research in space aims to help humans on Earth enjoy better health and longer lives.

Space-flown worms show that the molecules in the muscle that help movement and breathing become altered, and we are interested in how these same molecules in humans are altered after ageing and exercise on Earth. To do this, we perform clinical trials, and these clinical trials are where people volunteer for research investigations that aim to try out new treatments and interventions.

In particular, we perform clinical trials that focus on muscle responses to ageing, exercise and immobilisation. Now, these studies involve recruiting our volunteer group of interest, collecting data on their characteristics, such as their age, their height, their body weight, and putting them through exercise tests to see how strong their muscles are. We also often collect biological samples from our volunteers as part of a clinical trial, such as blood and muscle tissue, to see how the molecules in the muscle and blood change in response to an intervention.

We have seen, in space-flown worms, that a group of molecules that help the muscles contract become disrupted. On Earth this same group of molecules can be disrupted through exercise, so we have performed a clinical trial that investigated the effects of strenuous exercise on muscle repair in young and older adults. During this trial we found that the ability of older adults to repair their muscle function was the same as the younger people, but what was really, really interesting is that the molecules within the muscles that aid repair responded slightly differently in older versus younger people.

Now, it's these molecular changes over time that may be what is contributing to muscle loss with ageing. We also know from space-flown worms that the parts of the cell that are responsible for breathing and producing energy do not function as well. Now, on Earth, these same parts of the cell tend to decline in health with ageing, so we have performed a clinical trial that provided older adults with a supplement to improve the health of the cell's breathing apparatus, and we found that the supplement tended to improve the ability of the cells to breathe, which is quite amazing.

Now, this intervention may therefore offer a potential intervention for older adults to keep their muscles healthy. In addition to these clinical trials, we are also performing immobilisation studies. Now, this is where a lower limb or a limb, such as your arms or your legs, are subjected to weightlessness through the isolation of a limb. Now, this can be done through applying a cast or a knee brace onto the leg, and within these studies we are taking muscle biopsies from multiple different skeletal muscles after the immobilisation and we are doing this to see if the mechanisms of muscle loss are different between different muscle groups.

We are also performing immobilisation studies into ageing adults to see if the mechanisms of muscle loss are the same across age. And we're also going to be testing if the mechanisms of muscle loss are the opposite to muscle growth. Since the limbs don't do any weight bearing in these studies, immobilisation is a really, really good model for us on Earth to simulate the effects of space flight. So, our findings will be particularly important for developing interventions that are aimed at keeping muscles healthy during space flight and on Earth.

Next time join me to discover the art of analysing muscle tissue samples. See how labs analyse blood and muscle tissue samples and discover the differences found in the muscles of older people compared to younger ones.

Subscribe to this fascinating series on how research into worms in space is helping human health on Earth.