Australian surgeon developing an extra-terrestrial medical life pod

By Andrew Curran Correspondent Australia in Space

Australian vascular surgeon Abhilash (Abe) Chandra is on a mission to change how critically injured patients are treated in remote and hostile environments and, potentially, how sick people living in extra-terrestrial environments in the future are treated.

In addition to running a busy surgical practice from his base at Adelaide's Western Hospital, Chandra has founded a health/tech startup called SABRN that is developing a cutting-edge surgical life pod that can be dropped into warzones and humanitarian disaster regions on Earth, and one day, be deployed into space.

Chandra didn't form SABRN to be a pioneer in extraterrestrial medicine. His motivation for developing the life pods is straightforward. As a doctor, he knows too many soldiers die from injuries because they don't make it to a hospital fast enough.

"If we look at Afghanistan and Iraq, the soldiers who were killed in action, 25% of them were potentially preventable deaths, and this is an environment where the Allied Forces had complete air superiority," he told Australia in Space. "The paradigm now is that the patients must go to the hospital. I'm trying to change the paradigm - the hospital can come to the patient because that's where lives are saved."

Chandra wants to use his first life pods, extensively kitted out as one-person fly-in-fly-out trauma units, to make sure injured personnel, notably those with internal injuries, get top-tier emergency treatment within the so-called golden hour and, ideally, within what he calls the "platinum ten," –treatment within ten minutes of receiving the injury.

The life pods are still in the developmental stage. He has mock-ups in Adelaide and will be showing those off at the 15th Australian Space Forum in Adelaide in May 2023. He says the basic version of the terrestrial life pods are the size of small shipping containers and weigh up to 500 kilograms. They can enter hostile zones as container cargo and do the last mile via truck or helicopter.

Chnadra points out that the ability to chopper critically injured soldiers out of war zones is decreasing. "The Allied Forces may not have air superiority in future conflicts. In fact, there may not be anything like an air capability for extraction because, as we see from Ukraine, nothing that goes up in the air stays in the air. We can provide better care for our soldiers on the ground because they will need to be maintained in the field for a much longer period."

Chandra is exploring several international opportunities and says that if he secures funding, he can have a working prototype ready by the end of 2024. "From a terrestrial pod perspective, all of the technologies exist now, and I will be able to put everything together by the end of this year to get a minimum viable product."

But it is Chandra's ambition to replicate his terrestrial medical life-pod into an extra-terrestrial environment that makes this piece of kit something special. "I'm working ona whole host of products to develop that extra-terrestrial pod," he said. "A lot of that is pure research and development. We need to figure out the AI algorithms. We need to look at integrating robotics with the advanced sensors – much of that is unproven and not developed yet."

SABRN's life pods are the kind of big-picture thinking that has the potential to link into NASA's Artemis program, which wants to set up a long-term human presence on the Moon and, eventually, push onto Mars. Via a 2019 funding contribution, Australia already has a foothold in Artemis.

"When we make that transition from a terrestrial variant to an extra-terrestrial variant, things will need to change," Chandra said. "We don't necessarily want something that is the shape of a shipping container, and the payload costs mean we can't take as many things. I was at the NASA Human Research Program in Houston in February, and they are doing a lot of things that are looking at miniaturising equipment."

The surgeon also talks about research underway in Adelaide to solve the problem of the inter-planetary communications time lag and sending precision instructions to a scalpel-wielding robotic arm on Mars. "I'm working with the Andy Thomas Space Centre here in Adelaide and the Future Industries Institute at the University of South Australia to try and develop a proof of concept of a completely autonomous surgical robot."

Chandra believes that with the rapid advances in robotics and medicine, a robot could perform minor surgery, such as excising a skin lesion, within the next five years. Getting regulatory approval to let a robot do that might take that long again. But it is unlikely there will be colony on the Moon before then, so the long lead-in time isn't necessarily a problem for SABRN's extra-terrestrial life pods.

"The proof of concept where we can have something being excised by a robot with zero human intervention or interaction is very, very soon. I think within three years," he said. Advances in robotic technology aside, sending a surgical or even a simple diagnostic life pod into an extra-terrestrial environment presents all sorts of logistical and design challenges. But Chandra says despite this, we will have an obligation to look out for the people we send to future lunar settlements.

"It's a duty of care," he said. "I think that we need to make sure that the level of healthcare we provide to the first people who colonise the lunar or Mars surface is at least the same as what is available to people on Earth, even better.

Inspirational concept image only

"According to US MEDEVAC policy, injured personnel cannot be transported without qualified medical personnel," he said. "Obviously, that will need to change over time as technology improves. Also, as the environment becomes more austere and hostile, if we can develop autonomous technologies that can look after and sustain life, then we don't have to risk the lives of search and rescue personnel. That becomes more real if we are going out into an extraterrestrial environment."

Chandra isn’t afraid to state that healthcare for our military personnel can be better. He also isn't all dreamy-eyed over this. He knows not every life can be saved. Still, he would like to see the current mortality count decrease, and he wants to pursue that agenda into extra-terrestrial environments.

Concept images supplied

Concept images supplied