Supporting Health Research Data Collection for the Historic Ax-4 Mission to the International Space Station

Updated on June 25, 2025

The Ax-4 mission — Axiom Space’s fourth commercial astronaut flight to the International Space Station launched on June 25, 2025, and we’re thrilled to announce that TrialX is once again playing a key role in advancing space health research. In partnership with the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH), TrialX is proud to support this historic mission by enabling critical health research data collection to further our understanding of human health and performance in space. Building on our contributions to missions like the first three Axiom missions, Fram2, and Inspiration4, we continue to expand the frontiers of decentralized research by helping collect critical health research data beyond Earth.

What is the Ax-4 Mission?

Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) represents a historic milestone for international human spaceflight. For the first time, astronauts from India, Poland, and Hungary boarded the International Space Station as part of a single mission, each representing their nation’s return to human spaceflight after over four decades.

The Ax-4 crew includes:

• Shubhanshu Shukla, India’s second astronaut since 1984
  
  
• Sławosz Uznański, ESA project astronaut and Poland’s second astronaut since 1978
  
  
• Tibor Kapu, Hungary’s second astronaut since 1980
  
  
• Peggy Whitson, Ax-4 commander, a veteran NASA astronaut with the U.S. record for the longest cumulative time in space

This mission marks the first-ever visit to the International Space Station for all three national programs and exemplifies how commercial spaceflight is creating new opportunities for global collaboration in low-Earth orbit.

Ax-4 Mission Research Goals

Ax-4 will feature the highest volume of research activities ever conducted on an Axiom mission to date—around 60 scientific studies across 31 countries, spanning areas such as:

• Human health and performance
  
  
• Earth and space observation
  
  
• Biological and material sciences

Participating countries include India, Poland, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Nigeria, the U.S., and more. This mission not only underscores the collaborative nature of modern space exploration but also highlights the growing interest in microgravity research from national governments, space agencies, and institutions around the world.

TrialX’s Role in the Ax-4 Mission

TrialX’s Remote Data Collection Platform plays a critical role in enabling decentralized biomedical research in space. For the Ax-4 mission, we are supporting data collection from a range of studies exploring spaceflight effects on human:

• Cognitive function
• Sleep cycles and motion sickness
• Genome changes
• Eye and brain health

The Ax-4 crew will use TrialX EXPAND application to collect surveys on TRISH Essential Measures – a collection of surveys and tests on environmental and personality traits related parameters. Working with wearable devices like BioIntellesense BioButton sensors and Garmin smartwatches, the crew will also collect data on vital physiological parameters, including Heart rate & Heart Rate Variability, Blood oxygen saturation levels (SpO₂), Stress, Step count, Respiration rate, Sleep summary and Skin Temperature.

This data will be securely uploaded to the EXPAND database and biorepository —a first-of-its-kind repository developed in partnership with TRISH in 2021—to allow researchers to study space health trends across missions.

TrialX’s Contributions to Space Health Research

Since its inception, the EXPAND database has grown to house clinical research and flight data from seven major commercial space missions, including Inspiration4, MS-20, Ax-1, Ax-2, Ax-3, Polaris Dawn and Fram2. Our work has been highlighted at NASA’s Human Research Program IWS 2025 and recognized in Nature, reflecting our contributions in remote clinical data collection for spaceflights.

With the Ax-4 crew actively conducting experiments, we eagerly anticipate the groundbreaking insights this mission will deliver. We remain committed to supporting TRISH, Axiom Space, and researchers around the world in advancing the frontiers of human exploration.

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