🍄 Adventures in Microgravity

Mars’s marvelous medicine? Possibly one day. Today, in-orbit experiments pave the path for in-space manufacturing and maybe miracle medicines of tomorrow.

Feb 16, 2024

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In-space manufacturing is on its way. It's going to be huge. It will be comparable to the automobile industry, the electronic industry, computers all thrown together. It would be like one group only having the periodic table of 115 or 118 elements and another group having that, plus 50% more. What could you do?

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. So NASA has its sights set on a mission to Mars by way of the moon. In-space manufacturing, however, has lift off. Striding through space and meandering microgravity, scientists show how stem cells grow better in orbit and you can create the perfect crystals in space. Now, accelerating research into aerospace medicine means that highly personalized medicine and potential new cancer treatments could finally take flight.

Out of this world

Space is revealing to be a cosmic treasure trove for research and development. Its higher levels of radiation, microgravity and near vacuum-less state allow scientists to come up with new manufacturing methods or materials that are not possible on Earth. “If you look at pharma, semiconductors, beauty and health products and potentially food in the sense of like new crops, we estimated the [in-space manufacturing] market to be above $10 billion at some point in 2030, depending on the speed of maturation,” Ilan Rozenkopf, a partner at the global consultancy firm, McKinsey tells CNBC.

And in the 2024 fiscal-year budget, President Joe Biden earmarked $5 million for NASA to specifically pursue cancer-related research on the International Space Station (ISS). However, the price of getting a single experiment to ISS and back, according to The Guardian, is around $7.5 million, particularly if it includes astronaut time, a fee that is currently covered either by NASA or research grants.

Still, it’s starting to pick up. According to NASA, scientific research performed in space has already helped advance understanding of Alzheimer’s disease, asthma, cancer, and osteoporosis, as well as the search for treatments.

“This is not science fiction any more,” Yossi Yamin, CEO of SpacePharma, told The Guardian (2023.) “Last year, we accomplished seven in-orbit experiments, and the number is growing. Next month, we are flying five experiments into space in realms ranging from the future of skincare to longevity drugs and brain diseases.” SpacePharma works with global clients from children’s hospitals to big pharma. Using technology developed at Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, biologists can miniaturise their experiments, send them to the ISS and remotely control them from the ground.

One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind...

Full beam ahead

The UK Space Agency (UKSA) reports that the ‘list of technological advances from space’ includes implantable heart monitors, light-based anti-cancer therapy, compact water purification systems and biomedical technologies. ‘The knowledge gathered leads to a host of new developments that benefit us all on Earth, such as advanced new materials, deeper understanding of how humans age, as well as providing the understanding needed to help humans live and work in deep space,’ it says.

‘Who knows, maybe in the future we will have satellites flying around growing organs like in a science fiction movie,’ Clive Svendsen, executive director of the regenerative medicine institute at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, tells The Guardian. ‘Maybe we can grow a whole heart in zero gravity that we can then utilise back on Earth. We’re the pioneers in this area. We will push it as hard as we can and see what happens.’

As part of the UK Microgravity Experiments Call launched by the UKSA in 2022, several experiments - with up to £3 million of funding - will be set-up and flown to the International Space Station by 2025/26.

Merits of microgravity

‘The sensation of weightlessness was somewhat unusual compared to ground conditions. Here a sensation arose like hanging horizontally on belts, as if in a suspended state.’ – from the report of cosmonaut Major Yuri Gagarin, April 13, 1961.

‘Microgravity is defined as a tiny portion of the gravity we know on Earth: only 1 one-thousandth as strong,’ explains Britannica. ‘In microgravity, people feel so little gravity they are practically weightless. In space, microgravity means there's no need to walk. One can float through a space station, pushing one's self along. Liquids don't pour, because pouring depends on gravity to make liquid fall. Instead, liquids turn into blobs in air.’

‘It is the absence of gravity that has long made space such an attractive playground for teasing apart some of biology’s intricacies,’ writes David Cox, a science journalist and former neuroscientist, for The Guardian. ‘The pull of the Earth’s gravitational field can mask some of the ways in which cells communicate, making it harder to understand why they behave as they do. Gravity makes it far more complex to keep stem cells in their purest and most useful state for extended periods, constantly nudging them and encouraging them to develop. It also makes it much more difficult for scientists to study the complex crystal structures of key proteins, for example those linked to cancer, viruses, genetic disorders and heart disease. Growing these fragile crystals from scratch is crucial for analysing how a tumor or a virus evolves, or detecting little pockets where a new drug could sit. But when they are grown on Earth, gravity tugs at them, obscuring how they really look.’

“It’s been know for a long time that microgravity is a unique environment, so strange things happen to organic and inorganic substances,” Robert Bigelow, founder of Bigelow Aerospace tells ALICE. “Microgravity holds enormous promise for future materials. If we were to know the final solution to cancer — if we were to know that could be found and perfected in microgravity research — it would be the type of push to really make things happen.”

"I have had a theory for some years that there are two kinds of species in the universe: those that have always been terrestrially bound on their planet, and everything they do and everything they know and everything they will do is based on that influence, gravity influence. And then you have those that have not only had that, but then they evolve into where they have large, robust, microgravity systems. And I really think that in short time there will be no comparison between the technologies of those two groups, and the ones that have had the robust, large facilities in microgravity would have found things that would just blow the socks off the other group.” —Robert Bigelow, Space Maverick ALICE interview 2020

Aerospace medicine

‘Ground control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on.’ – David Bowie, Space Oddity.

While first developed in 1929 to tend to tired pilots, and then astronauts returning from space, the practice of aerospace medicine now goes beyond care for the crew. ‘While various missions to space, particularly to and from the International Space Station have continued through the decades, it is only within the last few years that plans to expand space exploration have accelerated,’ the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) said last year. ‘And with them, so has the demand for physicians and medical researchers with expertise in aerospace medicine, a specialty focused on the distinct impact of aviation and space travel on the human body.’ The lack of gravity, for example, will cause bone and muscle degradation at faster than normal rates. ‘While only a small number of humans have experienced outer space, the impact of the space environment on their physiology can expand scientific knowledge for the general population.’ And it’s pointing to the field of personalized medicine, which tailors pharmaceuticals and optimal treatments to a patient’s unique physiology.

Test tube maybes

“Every single thing that we look at in space flight has applications for Earth health care,” agrees Emmanuel Urquieta Ordonez, MD an assistant professor at the Center for Space Medicine and chief medical officer at the Translational Research Institute for Space Health at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Scientists at Baylor collect genetic samples from astronauts before, during, and after spaceflight and use the institution’s genomic sequencing center to analyze how different genes react in the space environment. They also study pharmacogenomics — how a person’s genes influence how they respond to medications — to optimize effective pharmaceutical disease management during space travel.

Cancer treatment for the future

Last year, during a private astronaut mission to the I.S.S., researchers from the University of California San Diego Stanford Stem Cell Institute conducted experiments intended to help develop more effective cancer therapies. “Space is a uniquely stressful environment,” said Catriona Jamieson, MD, PhD, professor at UC San Diego School of Medicine, Koman Family Presidential Endowed Chair in Cancer Research at UC San Diego Health and director of the Stanford Stem Cell Institute. “By conducting these experiments in low Earth orbit, we’re able to understand mechanisms of cancer evolution in a compressed time frame and inform the development of new cancer stem cell inhibitory strategies.”

An earlier mission found that cancer cells regenerate and resist standard therapies much more quickly in space than they do on Earth. This has inspired scientists to use an accelerated timeline and organoid models to test how cancers like leukemia, colorectal cancer, and breast cancer adapt to resist therapies.

Failure to launch

It can be just as hard to get research off the ground. ‘There are tales of companies, such as Boston-based Angiex, which made intriguing breakthroughs relating to a possible new cancer drug through experiments in space before abandoning the work because it was too costly and time-consuming,’ writes David Cox in The Guardian.

And it’s a tale of old as time. “Back in the early ‘80s before the Challenger accident happened, there was a very active program in flying experiments in America, and the pharmaceutical industry was very involved in that,” Bigelow tells ALICE. “But there was a problem whereby they couldn’t count on when their missions were going to fly, and sometimes they would have to wait an extra year, or maybe two years, or maybe three years. So that became really disastrous for the industry because they couldn’t count on a date.” Bigelow’s aeronautics and outer space technology company designed inflatable astronaut habitats for NASA and its soft, expandable activity module called BEAM was attached to the ISS.

Bigelow said that too often there was too little time, or that experiments would be contaminated in some way. “But in spite of that they found unique things - really unique things – happened. Extremely pure things were created, whether it was crystals or anything to do with fiber optics, such as Z-BLAN, other kinds of materials which would become extremely hard, or durable.”

What else we are wandering...

🔍 Space pace
Two current heart experiments intended to assist astronauts in space, could eventually help people on Earth suffering from heart conditions due to aging or a weakening of the heart muscle. Astronauts aboard the International Space Station are working on two cardiovascular tissue experiments guided by researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder, with grants led by Stanford University and Johns Hopkins University. “When astronauts go to space it can have negative impact on their cardiovascular systems,” said Stefanie Countryman, director of BioServe Space Technologies, which has developed the hardware for the experiments and has an orbiting incubator on ISS. “Our organs evolved to work here on Earth so they function differently in space.”Past heart studies have shown that just four weeks of microgravity exposure causes significant changes in cell function and gene expression that could lead to long-term damage or cardiac muscle atrophy.

The Stanford experiment utilizes simplified heart tissues to test pharmaceuticals that could reduce microgravity-induced changes in heart cell function. The Johns Hopkins project aims to study human cardiomyocyte functional performance and the potential of specific therapeutics to prevent negative impacts. “The goal with both of these projects is to better understand how these treatments impact cardiovascular issues in Earth bound people and to advance treatments that could be provided to astronauts before launch or while in space.”

🔍 Neurological gray area
Researchers don’t know about astronauts’ neurological states and no one knows about the space state of mind. Is cognition affected by the pressure that fluids shifting headward put on the brain, for example? “Few of the NASA astronauts want to volunteer to stick a needle in their brain or eye to measure pressure while in space,“ Dorit Donoviel, director of the Translational Research Institute for Space Health (TRISH) at the Baylor College of Medicine, tells the New York Times. “It’s a risk. And they are afraid we might find something that might prevent them for medical reasons from being able to fly. We’ve had this experiment on the books for years.” Researchers are pinning their hopes on space-tourism passengers to volunteer for experiments in future…

🔍 Are we nearly there yet?
Last June, Varda Space Industries, a Cali-based startup, launched pharmaceutical manufacturing into space. “It’s not as sexy a human-interest story as tourism when it comes to commercialization of the cosmos,” Will Bruey, Varda’s CEO and cofounder, tells CNN. “But the bet that we’re making at Varda is that manufacturing is actually the next big industry that gets commercialized.” Its satellite separated successfully from the rocket, did a good job, but hasn’t quite made it home. It would have been the first commercial space company to return a drug made in space to Earth. Read about the journey here.

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