How do we adjust to very high elevations and low oxygen levels, and what part do genes have in this process?
Sherpa Everest is a pioneering project whose goal is to try to find the answers.
A team of researchers from Barcelona traveled to the Himalayas to join the expedition of climber Ferran Latorre, who has just attained the summit of Mount Everest, signaling his 14th and final eight-thousander, the 14 peaks across the globe exceeding 8,000 metres in height.
It’s been a long and tough journey: “This is my temporary home: the tent, here. You try to adapt things to your needs, but, of course, you spend many hours here alone and you miss your home, your house and the people. There are times when you feel a bit down,” he says.
Latorre is among the project’s so‑called guinea pigs. At a field hospital perched 5,400 metres atop Everest Base Camp, clinicians conducting the study collect samples from 15 climbers from various countries and 22 sherpas. Since electricity is scarce, the blood samples are stored cooled within the Khumbu glacier’s icefall.
From there, they are flown by helicopter to Kathmandu. They will arrive in Barcelona in the coming weeks to be analyzed at the Hospital of Santa Creu i Sant Pau.
When scientists talk about how the body handles very thin air and low oxygen, they describe many signals in our cells that turn stress into adaptation. Gene regulation acts like a dimmer for our biology: it doesn’t change the code, but it changes how strongly instructions are read. In low-oxygen conditions, the body may make more proteins that help move oxygen, or improve how mitochondria work to get more energy from the oxygen available. This fine-tuning happens through epigenetic changes, where chemical marks on DNA or nearby proteins control access to genes without changing the sequence. In simple terms, two people with the same genes can react very differently to the same height if one has trained or been exposed to conditions that shape these regulatory paths. Over time, repeated exposure can improve the body’s readiness by shifting regulatory networks to better handle low oxygen, reduce fatigue, and keep muscle mass. Researchers want to map which signals—hormonal, inflammatory, and metabolic—feed into these networks, and how they differ between people who live long-term in low-oxygen environments and those who only visit high altitudes. By finding these patterns, they hope to design targeted actions, such as training plans or treatments, that help the body adjust more quickly when oxygen is scarce during ascent or recovery. In short, the study is not mainly about changing our genes, but about guiding how our genes talk to the environment to keep performance and health under low-oxygen stress.
Samples taken in the Himalayas will be compared with those of fifty patients suffering from respiratory conditions like asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and chronic oxygen deficiency.
“The aim of the project is to study how we adapt to oxygen deficiency – at sea level, at Everest Base Camp and after trying to reach the summit, more than 8,000 meters high – and then to compare it with people who live at Everest Base Camp year round, in an oxygen-poor environment,” explains Oriol Sibila, a pneumologist at Sant Pau Hospital.
So who will benefit from this research?
In addition to people suffering from chronic respiratory disease, it’s hoped it will help people travelling to high altitudes and mountaineers like Ferran Latorre, who says he’s not prepared to hang up his boots yet.
“Well, the truth is that after finishing the 14 ‘eight-thousanders’, I have other plans like opening up a new route on an eight-thousander, which I have so far failed to do,” he tells us. “I also want to try climbing Mount Everest’s northern slope without oxygen. And then I want to climb Cerro Torre, the north face of the Eiger… Those are all the things a mountaineer has to do before he can hang up his hiking boots.”
Whether the goal is scientific, athletic or personal, it’s an invitation for everyone to pursue their own Everest.
