Here is the full text and summary of Hilde Stenuit’s talk titled “How New Drugs Could Come From Space” at TEDxBrussels conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Dr Hilde Stenuit – Principal Scientist at Space Applications Services
Why on earth would anybody go to space for applications meant for earth? I want to take you on a cosmic ride to show that space is not just about discovering new galaxies and new planets, but that even secrets to cure diseases for us on earth may be found in outer space.
But first, let’s time travel back to 1998. I, a freshly minted astrophysicist, found myself with six weeks of free time between the end of my PhD and the start of a job in a space company. So what did I do? Did I lounge on a beach in Bali? No. I went to Florida, and I had honestly no idea at the time how significant that trip would be.
Little did I know then that I was witnessing history in the making. I saw, live from the launch area, how the first two modules of the International Space Station were coupled together while flying at 28,000 km per hour in space. That International Space Station has been permanently crewed since the year 2000, and all launches to the space station and all science done then was through the space agencies, through NASA, the European Space Agency, the Russian Roscosmos, Canadians, Japanese.
And the research done up there then was academic and descriptive, looking, for example, at how the bones and muscles of astronauts degrade over time. Yes, it taught us a lot about how space affects the human body, biological organisms, life and matter in general. But the space sector was about to undergo a major makeover.
In the year 2012, the first commercial spacecraft, SpaceX Dragon, made a visit to the International Space Station. SpaceX, in particular, led the shift in the whole space sector, not only because now a commercial company was launching rockets to the space station, but also because SpaceX relentlessly pursued making its rockets reusable by landing them after each flight instead of burning them in the atmosphere.
Those companies were pushing the boundaries of what we thought was possible by making rockets reusable and by paving the way for access to space. So here we are, in a brand new chapter of the space sector, filled with new actors, new technologies and new business models.
Because commercial services now provide for direct access to space, we are expanding the socio-economic sphere of activities from Earth to space in a pioneering way. The International Space Station, the Moon and other locations in space are now accessible for researchers, for companies, for tourists, for artists. It’s like a whole new world of science up there. A whole new environment of what is called microgravity.
Microgravity is the state of constant freefall that the International Space Station is in. Some people think that there is very little gravity on the station and that people float because it’s far out away in space. In fact, the station is closer than the distance from Brussels to Berlin. When we launch a rocket into space with a lot of power and speed, we put it in an orbit in such a way that it is actually constantly falling over and around the Earth. It falls and it falls with everything in it, including astronauts, every cell and every material. It’s an environment unlike any on Earth.
And it could hold the key to unlocking new discoveries in terrestrial sectors that never dreamt of having anything to do with space. So let me give you three examples of how the space environment can help drug research or other health applications by using this lab where gravity is drastically reduced.
So let’s start with space crystals. And in an Earth lab, researchers want to find a new cure for a nasty disease. They put on their lab coat, they pull out a microscope, and they start examining tiny little proteins in our body that might be causing the disease. When they find a protein that might be causing trouble, they want to know more about it. And that’s where protein crystallization comes in. It’s turning those tiny little proteins into larger, solid crystals that can be looked at using a microscope or x-ray.
And researchers can study those crystals and they can figure out more about the shape of the proteins. And that allows them to design drugs that can attack specific parts of the protein and that can fight the disease.
Now, here’s where things get really interesting, because when you do this crystallization of proteins in space, those space crystals, they come out bigger. And more importantly, they come out better structured and of higher quality than the same ones on Earth. So now researchers can study them more precisely, helping them in better drug discovery.
For a second example of how space can serve drug research, I want to tell you about mini-organs in space. So now with our new drugs, we want to test and screen them and see if they have the desired effect on the disease. And that process includes two steps. The first one is testing in tubes or in dishes with two-dimensional cell cultures. But those two-dimensional flat cell cultures, they do not accurately resemble the tissues in our body.
The second step would be to test those new drugs with animal models. But that too has major issues, ethical concerns. And if a drug tests well on animals, it may not necessarily work on humans because it’s different biology. So more and more, researchers and pharma are looking at three-dimensional cell models as an alternative.
And an interesting example of three-dimensional cell structures are organoids. Organoids are mini-organs that are grown in the lab based on human stem cells. And they are made to resemble different organs in our body, like the mini-brain that you see there, smaller than half a centimeter, or a mini-heart.