Dr. Lex Van Loon: Merging Mathematical Modelling and Healthcare in Space Exploration

Imagine unlocking the future of medicine with a single mathematical formula. That's what we're exploring with the brilliant Dr. Lex Van Loon, who has made an incredible impact in the realm of technical medicine. As a pioneer in this specialized field, Dr. Van Loon reveals how he uses mathematical modeling and artificial intelligence to transform biocomputation, and shares his experiences from the technical medicine program in the Netherlands. This unique course blends physics, mathematics, and medicine to equip doctors with the knowledge they need to embrace the latest techniques and technologies in healthcare.

The journey doesn't end there. Dr. Van Loon transports us to the sunny shores of Australia, where he ventured into the thrilling world of space medicine. Hear about his ground-breaking work in developing a model that predicts a person's fitness for space travel using patient data. This innovative approach has significant implications for space tourism, offering a safer and more personalized experience for future astronauts. 

As we soar into the final frontier, Dr. Van Loon delves into the physical impacts of space travel on the human body. He illuminates the process of creating personalized models of the cardiopulmonary system to assess an individual's health and fitness for space missions. We also explore the potential of using simulations for real-time health assessments of astronauts in space. And for all you young explorers out there, Dr. Van Loon shares some invaluable advice for those aspiring to make their mark in this incredible field. So, are you ready to launch into the future of space medicine? Tune in and let's embark on this extraordinary journey together.

Dr. Van loon's email: LexMaxim.vanLoon@anu.edu.au

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Transcript

Disclaimer/ Ad/ Intro: 0:00

The views and opinions expressed in this program are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of anyone at Innovative Sims Solutions or our sponsors. This week's podcast is sponsored by BrainNet Consulting Inc. Hello podcast listeners, If you're in healthcare education or know someone who is, BrainNet Consulting Inc brings you 19 years of experience and 29 successful global simulation center projects, making them your top choice for innovative medical simulation spaces. Imagine a learning environment where healthcare professionals thrive. Their comprehensive services, from simulation space design to simulation equipment selection, AV system design and IT and AV network operation, guarantee a safe and immersive learning experience. Ready to tap into this wealth of experience, Visit www. simadvicecom. Welcome to The Sim Cafe, a podcast produced by the team at Innovative Sims Solutions, edited by Shelly Houser. Join our host, Deb Tauber, and co-host Jerrod Jeffries, as they sit down with subject matter experts from across the globe to reimagine clinical education and the use of simulation. So pour yourself a cup of relaxation, sit back, tune in and learn something new from The Sim Cafe.

Deb Tauber: 1:41

Welcome to another episode of The Sim Cafe. Good morning, afternoon or evening listeners, and Jerrod, welcome. How are you today?

Jerrod Jeffries: 1:50

Good thanks. I'm excited for our next guest, but how are you doing, Deb?

Deb Tauber: 1:54

I'm doing good, thank you. It's getting cold here, so our next guest is Dr Lex Van Loon. He's an accomplished academic. He began his journey at the University of Twente in technical medicine. He ventured abroad, settling in Australia where he delved into space medicine, eventually returning to the Netherlands. Dr Van Loon's expertise lies in mathematical modeling and AI applications in biocomputation. Currently as a postdoctoral fellow at the Australian National University, his work promises groundbreaking advancements in patient-specific physiological models. Thank you very much and welcome Dr. Lex Van Loon. Would you like us to call you Dr Van Loon?

Lex van Loon: 2:41

Just call me Lex, that's fine, just call me.

Deb Tauber: 2:43

Thank you, thank you.

Jerrod Jeffries: 2:46

You can't even help but notice, but it sounds like you're the Dutch Elon Musk maybe. I mean you have so many different accolades it's like, okay, Mars, you have groundbreaking research. I know we'll get into some of the different places you've lived. It's pretty exciting to have you on, so thanks for being here.

Lex van Loon: 3:03

Thanks. Well, I must say Musk is super inspirational. I like to think I'm a little kinder, so hopefully we'll see you in the audience.

Jerrod Jeffries: 3:13

Well, we do too, so thanks. So the first would be that of something stuck out to me was technical medicine. So what is that? Can you give us and our listeners a little more background in there?

Lex van Loon: 3:24

Absolutely Sure, and I think that's a fair question, because here in the Netherlands I love people know about this because it started in the Netherlands, this course, this technical medicine course, and it's only started at my university, which is the University of Twenties, and they started like really small and I like to think this was still a new course, but it's been around for 15, 20 years now and it's pretty similar to medicine. So, in short, you'll become a doctor once you finish. So it takes six years, a bachelor, master's degree, but they incorporate a lot of the technical stuff there. So there's a lot of physics in there, mathematics, and it started off because they were thinking, okay, there's going to be more techniques in medicine and healthcare, we do need doctors that are able to handle that. So that's how it started and it's getting bigger and bigger. There are now three places within the Netherlands where you are able to study this program.

Jerrod Jeffries: 4:21

I love it, yeah, and so it starts with the foundation of being a doctor track, but maybe and I'm generalizing here, of course but then it's saying, hey, we also want to be more well-rounded in terms of, I would say again, generalizing the mathematics part of life or sciences.

Lex van Loon: 4:42

Yeah, yeah. So if you think of medicine on the one side and biomedical engineering on the other side, I would place technical medicine more towards medicine. So it's not so much about inventing new stuff, come up with new techniques, new machines, but it's more of using those new techniques. So biomedical engineer would typically come up with a new technique, a new device, and normally he would go up to a doctor and say, okay, if something new, can you try this. But they might feel comfortable with it. And that's where a technical physician would come in. He does know the underlying technique. So what's being used, what sort of protocols are in place there? And he would be best place to use that. So a lot of colleagues who work, for instance, in intensive care medicine or radiology, those kind of places is where people with my background end up the most.

Jerrod Jeffries: 5:37

You said it started I think about 14 years ago. Is this something that's offered in Netherlands and, if so, do you know if it's offered anywhere else? Because it does sound pretty intriguing.

Lex van Loon: 5:46

Yeah, so there are some places around the world that are starting to use it as well. So you have a program in.

Lex van Loon: 5:53

London which is doing the same thing. There's a professor in Singapore who started such a program and there's actually the location you are currently in. If I'm correct, in Copenhagen there's this program called Technical Medicine as well, but I haven't googled it for the last years. But those are the places I know that are doing something similar. But I think the beauty of the program we have here in the Netherlands is that you are a registered doctor afterwards, which is a use-it-tantage, so you can go into the hospital and you can actually perform therapies or interventions on patients and getting reimbursed by health insurance which is a use-it-tantage.

Deb Tauber: 6:34

Do you practice medicine at all with patients?

Lex van Loon: 6:38

I used to. I got a little rogue, to be honest, so I drifted more into academia. But my wife also studied technical medicine and she's now an ambiologist. So she's working with patients and in the IVA lab. So she's practicing medicine still and a lot of my colleagues are. So the program is expected, but it's a little bit of a failure to do that. But I'm a little sideways.

Deb Tauber: 7:05

You're advancing the field.

Lex van Loon: 7:07

Yeah, I am yes.

Deb Tauber: 7:10

What are medical serious games or virtual med school? Can you share with us what that is?

Lex van Loon: 7:18

Yeah, sure so when I started technical medicine, we had a really small simulation lab and I think that's how a lot of sim labs close to university falls for the start. So we had only two room plays with some mannequins and some training devices and I started working there as a student. I was able to supervise people coming in both students and both postgraduate students and the cool thing we had there was this human patient simulator and I think you had William van Mursen one of the other episodes and he's one of the inventors of that and already as a student I was super intrigued by this device because it's yeah, well, it costs a lot of money but it could do amazing things. So I was teaching some of the courses using this human patient simulator, mostly to postgraduate students or doctors and nurses and stuff like that.

Lex van Loon: 8:13

And what I found because it was quite expensive to train them on those machines that they were not really well equipped to go into those scenario training. So we were thinking they will need something before that which is a little bit more appealing than textbooks and just sheets to go over, because they get tons of that. So that's when we were thinking, ok, we need to create scenario training, but then in a game environment. So we started working together with a hospital on the other side of the Netherlands on creating a serious game. So the thought there was scenario training in a cool gaming environment where people could just play around and train with it, so to be better equipped to go face to face and do the hands-on training.

Jerrod Jeffries: 9:03

What's the learning objectives? Are there different modules or scenarios, or what's the yeah.

Lex van Loon: 9:09

so we started with this game which we called ABCDE-SIM that's probably something international right Do the ABCDE training. So go with the airway, breathing, circulation and stuff like that for resuscitation. And at the time you did have some e-learnings around that, but most of those tools they were script-based. So you got popped the question would you give fluid to this patient? And you could go left or right. But then didn't feel any sort of appealing to.

Lex van Loon: 9:42

Yeah, me as a young kid being used to games, we just want to go everywhere you want, right, you want to make the environment or the sandbox as big as possible and since I had this background of technical medicine, I was sort of comfortable with making models and do some maths. So we decided to not make a game which was script-based where you can only go different pathways and as a gamer you feel that, okay, I'm pushed towards this direction. I can't go left or right. So we use models which are just open and you can flow, so you can give something what the game would ask. You could give like half a liter of blood, but you could also try and mess around and give like 20 liters of blood. Just see what happens to your blood pressure, your heart rate whatever, which, yeah, in most cases would kill, like the simulated patient, but it gave you some feeling of where you could go to in terms of limits.

Jerrod Jeffries: 10:42

So we developed this model-based serious game and you said at the time around what year is this?

Lex van Loon: 10:50

Good question. This must be, I think, mike, 12 years ago or something.

Jerrod Jeffries: 10:57

Then something like 11-ish yeah something like that.

Lex van Loon: 11:02

So I did the mathematical modeling of things. So it was mostly just writing equations. And we have this super cool company in Amsterdam who made all the graphics. We thought it was super cool at the time. Now it looks pretty flat, but we're trying to make it a little bit more 3D and that's most of the projects I'm involved in. I think that's where technical medicine students are really good at connecting those dots within different disciplines working with those gaming engineers, working with technical people but also with medical people.

Jerrod Jeffries: 11:35

So was this used in Netherlands in a couple of places, or was this used elsewhere?

Lex van Loon: 11:40

Yes, this is some years ago. Those numbers are Just pop my mind. I think 50% of the hospitals within the Netherlands use this game for their training, so it's within their curriculum, so it's between textbooks. You have the serious game and do the hands-on scenario-based training. Yeah, so a lot of medical students and post-grad residents will use this game for their training, and we started with having like two different scenarios. I think there was one patient with some bleeding and there was another patient with a septic shock, but we have expanded that, so there are now over 20 different scenarios which you can choose from.

Jerrod Jeffries: 12:21

Okay, gotcha, and so we did this as we were chatting a little bit earlier. Was this what kind of? Got you noticed or interested in going abroad to Australia, or can you tell us about what made the move from Northern Europe to Down Under?

Lex van Loon: 12:38

Yeah, no, there wasn't a particular link to this game. My wife was doing a PhD at the same time and we had two small kids and we were just doing this red race of getting a PhD, managing kids, going to family parties all day, and we were thinking, okay, we need to do something different. Let's go to Brazil, to the Amazon, and do some voluntary work, which wasn't the smartest choice. We were thinking afterwards, because our oldest son, he, was born with some medical conditions. So we were thinking, okay, let's narrow this down to Western countries. But yeah, to answer your question, it was adventure.

Lex van Loon: 13:20

We were looking for an adventure and I just walked in different offices of colleagues, one of which was Willem van Meurs, and I said to him okay, if you know anything from anyone around the globe which needs someone like me, let me know. And then, just a week after, he came into my office saying, okay, I know a professor living in Singapore and he wants to copy paste technical medicine there. He wants to start the program as well. I was okay, it's farther than I thought, but Singapore I can do it, let's go there. But then he was transferred to Australia because he was originally from Australia and he just sent me an email Is Australia also fine in comparison to Singapore? I was like yeah, we're not.

Jerrod Jeffries: 14:05

So he told the idea to your wife that you're going to Singapore and you're like wait, no, just kidding, we're going to go another leg. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lex van Loon: 14:13

My wife was all in, so he's pretty easy going. But it was more grandparents that they were a little hesitant. They would think okay one flight Singapore from the Netherlands. We can do that. But yeah, going to Australia it's a whole different level. It's quite far away.

Jerrod Jeffries: 14:31

And then what?

Lex van Loon: 14:31

years were you there? So we were there when COVID hit. We went there in March 2020. Yeah, we were the last airplane to arrive in Australia without any sort of quarantine. Wow, we stayed there for the whole pandemic. So we were there for a little over three years.

Jerrod Jeffries: 14:50

So that was like the longest vacation you've ever had, yeah.

Lex van Loon: 14:54

What do you think, ? Yeah, we tried to work but yeah, we were having a great time. It was wonderful. There was no one around. There was so much to explore. It was like the best person you can get to. The borders were closed, but within those borders of Australia, there was a lot of things you could do.

Deb Tauber: 15:13

Wow, what was the most remembered thing that happened when you were there? What was your favorite thing?

Lex van Loon: 15:19

Well, I must say Christmas at the beach. We're going to miss that, yeah, yeah, because you're absolutely enjoying Christmas. Christmas is huge there, I didn't know. But now you have summer holidays, which is perfect, because normally Christmas here in Europe is always squeezed within work and family and it's always super busy. But in Australia you have weeks of holiday and you just go to the beach and have a barbecue and, yeah, at the best time. So, that's something I would definitely miss.

Deb Tauber: 15:50

Thank you, Thank you, Mars. Strength conditioning, zero gravity Don't you enlighten us about those different things?

Lex van Loon: 16:01

Yeah, that's a big jump from Christmas at the beach.

Lex van Loon: 16:05

The funny thing is, one of the other reasons we came to Australia is because Australia, as an ancient, they were trying to hang on to the space race. Right, they saw India, they saw China making great rockets, going exploring space and they were thinking we need something like that. And I must admit they are pretty well equipped terms of geographics they are close to the equator, they have lots of space to launch rockets and they want to have a part of the space tourism as well. So when I started working there as a postdoc, I was asked can you think of something, maybe use your models, to predict if someone is fit enough to go into space? Because up until then, people that went to space, they were really well trained astronauts. They were training for years, they run multiple tests and if there's just one thing not checking the box, you were just excluded. You couldn't go into space.

Lex van Loon: 17:11

But now, with Musk and other companies launching those rockets, it was not limited to your health, it's limited to your money and those super rich guys or women, they are not particularly healthy in any sense. So we started working on a project which we called fit to fly. So we did a bunch of measurements on patients and put those measurements into my model and just fast forward. What happens if I put this person into a space environment, and how would they react? Would their heart be happy, their vessels be happy, their eyes and stuff like that? So have a simulated environment of this person in space.

Jerrod Jeffries: 17:55

What piece of the criteria were you putting in there? And that's one part, but two are you taking data from, like an Apple Watch or a WOOP or something that's actually taking the? You know the patients taking their own data and then plugging it in? Or can you just tell me a little bit about that process?

Lex van Loon: 18:11

Yeah, sure, so we were focused because we were focusing on space tourism and those tours. They go into space for a short period of time, so I think one of the major risks for humans going to space is radiation, but if you go for such a short period of time, it's less important, however, for your cardiovascular system. So heart, lungs, blood pressure, stuff like that those are affected within minutes to seconds. So we focus on cardiopulmonary system, all characteristics of your heart and your vessels and your lungs, and in order to personalize these models, you need to do need information from a person, and Apple Watch and those sort of wearable things maybe in the future could be used for that, but for now we need it more. So we need it ultrasounds, we need it, intrafascular pressure, stuff like that. So the really yeah for medical, medical data.

Deb Tauber: 19:15

Have you been to any of the space travel? Have you done any of the space travel?

Lex van Loon: 19:20

No, no, but well, we have money to do so. We obtained, like a huge grant from the Commonwealth in Australia, which is part of our lounge, and there are multiple universities and companies involved, and we have actually dedicated money to test the system of muddling the human body within space. So we have allocated some money. We haven't decided on who to go, so if you are interested in, let me know.

Jerrod Jeffries: 19:50

I'm putting my hat in the ring, Lex.

Lex van Loon: 19:54

I was like you. I was just like you, but the more I learn about what it does to the human body, the less I'm going to be when ignorance is bliss, I guess. I will send you some paper with which might change your mind.

Jerrod Jeffries: 20:08

Yeah, I want to dig a little deeper in the simulation side though, so in expound where you want, but I'm trying to generalize it here again. So the goal of your position in Australia and what you were trying to accomplish or are accomplishing, is you're trying to simulate to see if an individual is fit enough to be not only active but belong in space at a zero gravitational area, for a certain duration and come back down to earth in a healthy state.

Lex van Loon: 20:41

Yeah, the majority of my worry lays in the last part, where they come back, because going into space makes life easier for your body, for the cardiovascular yeah, if I just look at my kids, gravity can be a real B, which is not only to falling but it's also to pumping blood within your body.

Lex van Loon: 21:03

So as long as you're in space it's relatively easy and your system get lazy. So your heart are thinking, okay, this pressure is good enough, I will get enough blood into your brains, away from your feet, that's fine. So if you stay for a prolonged period of time within space and you come back to earth, you have a really hard time. If you go back and see astronauts coming back to earth from being in an international space station, they're always sitting down and that's not because they are lazy or anything, they're just their cardiovascular system is not adjusted to earth anymore. And the funny thing is women are actually better at it than men are because they're training. They train way more when they are up in space because they have to go to like Richard training schedules. They have to go on the treadmill and stuff like that and meal astronauts. They tend to be lazy, they skip those training.

Jerrod Jeffries: 22:01

And when they come back to earth, they just they faint because their cardiovascular system just went lazy, and when you say prolonged sorry, I'm getting a bit of the detail prolonged is that at 24 hours, or is that a month? What would that duration be?

Lex van Loon: 22:16

Yeah, that's something we study. The beauty of NASA is also that they publish all their data publicly available and they did a lot of measurements on astronauts. So we delved into that data and we found out that talking about prolonged, when there's like actual changing elasticity or compliance of your vessels, that's after six months. So up until six months it's short changes, so your the amount of blood will diminish things that can be adjusted easily, but really structural changes they occur after six months.

Jerrod Jeffries: 22:56

Okay, it's fascinating because Dev and I have met so many incredible people on this on this podcast, and to see that simulation is also being played into this. I don't want to call it a space race, but into outer space. It also, you know, it might want to make complete sense, but to be able to change all these variables and alter their criteria and a safe, you know, environment being on earth one, but to also say, okay, we want someone that this height or we need someone who is this way. Obviously, predisposition or genetic things aside, you can also figure out what's the ideal. I mean, as all athletes are, I guess you could consider someone going to outer space and athlete, but they're the best size or shape for most positions and whatever sport someone's playing. In my opinion, now you're taking that same type of science and saying, hey, this is the best type of individual to go, you know, as you're even saying with women to go to into outer space.

Lex van Loon: 23:55

Yeah, yeah, and even a step further. The big dream here is to use those simulation and present the result directly back to the astronaut or to the patient. So that's one of the studies we did with traveling to Mars. Like in the best situation when Mars and Earth are close to each other, just bringing Mars back Earth saying, okay, something is going on, I'm not feeling well, could the duck help me with this and take a look at it? That takes 30 minutes.

Lex van Loon: 24:29

So just getting the signal from Mars to Earth so you can imagine if something serious is going on, it takes 30 minutes to send the signal. Someone has to look at it and send it back takes another 30 minutes. So it takes an hour just to ask a question and pop an answer. So the ultimate dream here is to use simulation to give an answer already. So an astronaut going to Mars not feeling well and use his model, which we've been using, to predict if he's fit to fly and he does something change his blood volume diminished or his heart has some arrhythmia. Get a new measurement, put it into the model and see what happens if we give drug A or drug B or something like that, and really use this model and simulation to predict what's the best therapy.

Jerrod Jeffries: 25:21

Is this the kind of institute or your research? Is it one of the first doing this in terms of outer space and simulation? And I mean this is a big challenge, of course, that the time duration or lapse between communication, but what are some of the biggest challenges in being one of the first only, or whatever it is doing? The research?

Lex van Loon: 25:42

Yeah, I think we are one of the first to do this kind of research for space medicine. Of course, there are multiple approaches to do this sort of approach and the term being used within my field is called digital twin. So you try to make a copy of something, and that's mostly being done for mechanical stuff, so you can create a digital twin simulation of an airplane, of a rocket, but that can be done of a human, of course, as well, especially if you limit yourself to the plumbing of humans, the vessels, the heart. That's easier to model and to simulate. So this digital twin approach is being used for acute care, emergency medicine, intensive care medicine, stuff like that.

Lex van Loon: 26:27

But for space I think we are one of the first. And to answer the second part of your question, is it hard or what makes it hard? Yes, because we've never been able to send someone into space, to Mars and stuff like that. So there's many questions about how would your system evolve and progress? There have been astronauts into space for more than a year, so that data can be used and extrapolate.

Jerrod Jeffries: 26:55

And you guys. So NASA publishes that and you have access to that data, then yeah, yeah, yeah, it's probably available.

Lex van Loon: 27:00

And I think the second part which we are struggling now, when we are working with a number of companies around the world, is getting good sensor data, because sensors might work here on Earth, but if you put them into space we have no clue. So we are hooking those sensors up into persons and adding radiation, for instance, because those radiation that you can see into space, they might very well affect the results. Yeah so the sensors that we were relying on here on Earth might not work in space?

Jerrod Jeffries: 27:33

Yeah. So the first one is are you helping create your simulations based off the data that was already been created from these space agencies?

Lex van Loon: 27:43

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we do know from space agency how your blood volume changes in space and we do know how the thickness of your heart will diminish and stuff like that. So we use those kind of information for our models.

Jerrod Jeffries: 28:00

Yes, ok yeah, because I remember and there's a Elon Musk book that's out by Walter Egeson and when they were launching the Falcon, another prototype that failed, the liquid propellant, it changed, obviously, state because of the user so far up and it bumped the thruster and everything crashed and stuff. So I can imagine that you take that you know that's on I want to say macro, but on a larger level, and you take this to a micro level of the human body and of course blood's going to change, of course your organs are going to feel different. So it just takes it and you compound it to every single level to say, ok, this is where you're on Earth, you're one, and you even feel the same right, if you're near the equator versus the pole, there are some changes that you can see as well, and so this is 10, 20 times X, if not more.

Lex van Loon: 28:48

Yeah, yeah, and luckily, I think for all the limits I'm using, we have astronauts doing that.

Lex van Loon: 28:54

So I think this time scale I'm talking here is seconds, minutes to up to a year and we have astronauts doing that. Not saying it's easy to do that for them, because if you look at the data, it's a lot of things changes within your body. One of the things was striking me as well was that if you go into space, you might know that your blood will shift. It will move to your head rather than just your feet and you get like a really puffy face, which is not big of a problem. But also this increase in blood within your head it will sort of pop out your eyes. So if you ever get a chance to look at an astronaut coming back Earth after a prolonged period of time to space, look at his eyes. They will be sort of popping out of his brain and those astronauts, they have a really, really hard time using their eyes once they're back. I think a lot of them have actually lost their driving license because of that, because it does affect their eye function.

Jerrod Jeffries: 29:51

So not to be too gruesome, but are there any other major, you know major drawbacks of having the space besides loss of eyesight?

Lex van Loon: 29:59

Yeah, so eyesight, I would say, is one of them, but also blood clotting has occurred. Increased risk, A huge increased risk. Yeah, and arrhythmia. There was actually an astronaut who they were monitoring just for the sake of it that he was putting an ECG at this heart rate and he had a lot of episodes where his heart just stopped. He didn't feel it because it was for such a small short time that he was not affected by it, but yeah, it was recorded and we're still figuring out whether that's due to space or there's something else, but there are some clues that it is a space in you.

Jerrod Jeffries: 30:37

You mentioned the digital twin piece. So in the future, say, you have an astronaut right, free space. You would then take all their different sets or make a creation of them, digitally or virtually. You would then have the physical human go up into space and then would you project or forecast what the digital twin, if they didn't go to space, would look like versus that of you know what, once they go to space, what that would look like. Is that what I'm understanding?

Lex van Loon: 31:10

Yeah, that's it. If we want to do the prediction whether someone is fit to fly, so I can take your stats, put them in my model, fast forward, what happens if Jared stays up into space for a day, a week, a month looks fine, but what happens if I put them into space for a year? Yeah, so that's what we are currently doing and the big dream is that in the future we can update this model. So now something has changed to your body, to your system, does it affect this prediction of the future? Maybe come back because something has changed. We were thinking you was fit enough, but now something has changed.

Deb Tauber: 31:52

Lex, how long does the testing take? How long do you do test a person before you say, yeah, you can go?

Lex van Loon: 31:58

Yeah, well, for space tourism. There are no clear guidelines on that, so it's just what every company feels safe like, and I think what they do now is sign a lot of waivers, so people going to space, they just sign off all their rights. But I think, using our technique, we can make it a lot safer.

Deb Tauber: 32:20

Now, if you could go back to when you started all this, what would you do differently? Are there things that you would have done differently?

Lex van Loon: 32:27

No, not so much. To be honest, it's so much fun. I can watch like base movie, rockets, stuff like that during work time. Talk to super interesting people. No, it's a lot of fun.

Jerrod Jeffries: 32:43

Great. Are there from all this groundbreaking science and research and such? Is there anything that you would want to leave our listeners with? I was thinking about this question before.

Lex van Loon: 32:53

I have a hard time saying what to do, what to do not. But I think if you are like a young listener and I'm still pretty young myself I would say just go out there and talk to people, get a big network. I would never end up in Australia working on space medicine if I was not going to like the events at the university talking to people, meeting people, get a network. Just meet people and people are always happy to help. The world is good. People will try to help you forward. For my last project I was thinking I'm collaborating with and I know nothing about this but with computer scientists, with surgeons, mathematics, astrophysicists and mechanical engineers, emergency doctors, that's all just because I approached them saying okay, I have this question, I have no clue how to fix it. Can you help me? The majority of people, they just will. They will try to.

Deb Tauber: 33:48

Yeah, I would agree, people do want to help, they want to share.

Jerrod Jeffries: 33:52

Yeah, they do. My favorite thing is that you've taken data that has been collected for decades and now you've based models and simulations on it. That's going to make potentially it's safer for everybody to fly in the future. Fly as in good outer space?

Lex van Loon: 34:09

Yeah, I really hope so. I feel that this is a step forward. This is going to sound super corny, but if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. If we can do this approach for space, we can do it here in the Earth-based scenario as well. You can have a person laying at the intensive care, getting his data, put it in my model and just fast forward. What happens if we don't treat this patient? What happens to this person if we give therapy A, b or C?

Deb Tauber: 34:40

That's a really, really great point when you think about it. When you've been in the hospital for a while, going back to your regular life especially for someone who's older, it's. I think there's a rule of thumb that if you've been down for one day, that takes much longer to get re-acclimated to being healthy again.

Lex van Loon: 34:59

Yeah, yeah, that's so right, it's actually pretty similar for astronauts going back to Earth as for someone who had to stay in hospital beds for a couple of weeks. That's what we do as well. We use young people, put them into bed for weeks, see what happens, to simulate those kinds of scenarios. Yeah, so space in astronauts is where this sounds. It can be similar to people staying in hospital beds for weeks here. Good point.

Deb Tauber: 35:30

Well, this has just been a very fascinating interview. Is there anything that you'd like to ask us or anything else that you'd like to add?

Lex van Loon: 35:39

No, no, this is really fun. It was great to talk to you guys.

Jerrod Jeffries: 35:45

Thank you for sharing your story, your journey. It's just so impressive how far our simulation stretches and seeing the type of model that you're creating, pioneering really. The factors of how many people from collaborate all of the world, from Netherlands to, potentially, Singapore Nope, just kidding Over to.

Deb Tauber: 36:07

Australia.

Jerrod Jeffries: 36:07

Yeah, skip it, and then just how it came about. So I appreciate you sharing the story and, hopefully, if any of our listeners want to get in touch with you for any questions, so how can they do that? They

Lex van Loon: 36:19

can just send me an email, available on Lexvanloon. com. Okay, great, we'll put that in the show notes as well.

Deb Tauber: 36:25

Yeah, perfect, all right, thank you so much and happy simulating.

Lex van Loon: 36:31

Thanks guys, thanks for having me.

Deb Tauber: 36:33

Thank you.

Disclaimer/ Ad/ Intro: 36:34

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