Biomanufacturing in space accelerating therapy development on Earth

Participants will include leading investigators for projects sponsored by NASA and the ISS National Lab, including some funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Davide Marotta, ISS National Lab director for in-space biomanufacturing will join the webinar along with an array of speakers, many of whom will touch upon topics that are relevant to biomanufacturing.  

For example, Alicia Boymelgreen, assistant professor at Florida International University, will discuss an NSF-funded investigation leveraging microgravity to improve models of active colloids. Those are self-propelling microscopic particles suspended within fluid, and which could have drug-delivery applications.  

Clive Svendsen, executive director of the Board of Governors Regenerative Medicine Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, will discuss establish methods that support the in-space manufacturing of stem cells that can be matured into tissues to improve regenerative medicine. 

Patrick O’Neill, public affairs and outreach lead at the ISS, shared a wealth of insight with BioProcess Insider into the ISS and the applications of biomanufacturing in space. He said Svendsen’s team focuses primarily on cardiac disease but “continues to look at the space station as a novel environment to further regenerative medicine and evaluate how the space station can facilitate in-space manufacturing for the benefit of patients on Earth.” 

Biomanufacturing in Microgravity 

“In the biological and physical sciences division, our mission is to pioneer scientific discovery, enable exploration, and return all that technology development to benefit humanity on Earth,” said Lisa Carnell, division director of the biological and physical sciences division of NASA, in an October 2023 panel hosted by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA.) She said that NASA’s predominant laboratory is the ISS. 

“Researchers have learned that microgravity often helps to promote an accelerated model for biomedical applications,” O’Neill told us. According to NASA, biomanufacturing and tissue engineering have advantages when performed in the microgravity environment of space. The microgravity of the ISS enables scientists to construct larger tissues that are not confined by the flattening gravitational pull of Earth. Evidence also suggests that living systems show signs of rapid aging when under the influence of microgravity, allowing for accelerated disease modeling that assists therapeutic development. 

O’Neill said biotherapeutic experiments in space have already shown real results on Earth. Pharma giant Merck & Co. has launched a series of investigations into protein crystal growth on the ISS to improve the efficacy of its monoclonal antibody (mAb) cancer therapeutic Keytruda (pembrolizumab). He also cited nanoparticle drug delivery and tissue engineering and stem-cell research as major areas of interest on the ISS. 

O’Neill explained the equipment used in space biomanufacturing is much the same as that used on Earth. He said there are over a dozen facilities on the ISS owned and operated by private companies that can assist scientists in research efforts. “They can focus on taking a project from an engineering perspective while [the researcher] focuses on the science to be performed on the space station.” 

He added, “There is [also] a miniPCR machine on the space station that can support genetics research, which incidentally supported the first clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology in space gene editing investigation, and has supported a variety of other DNA-inspired.” 

“One of the more prominent facilities of late garnering attention would be Redwire Space’s BioFabrication Facility,” said O’Neill. In 2023, Redwire used its on-station bioprinter to print the first human meniscus in space. 

“When I talk with people about doing research on the space station,” O’Neill said, “I liken it to living in a 3D world. However, what if you added a 4th dimension? Almost everything would be different, which is similar to research on the space station. You are launching an investigation to a brand new environment, and because of that, you will have the ability to observe its adaptation process, which could bring profound impacts back to us living in that normal 3D world.”