Pharma Looks to Outer Space to Boost Drug R&D

There are benefits of studying certain biological processes under microgravity, but whether those advantages outweigh the costs of getting experiments off Earth remains to be seen.

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On a cool December afternoon in 2018, on a viewing platform at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida, Jordan Greco watched his research project leave planet Earth. As chief scientific officer of the Connecticut-based biotech LambdaVision, he had spent years developing a protein-based artificial retina to treat patients blinded or severely visually impaired by retinal degenerative diseases. At 1:15 PM that day, a Falcon 9 launch rocket lit up the sky as it blasted the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft toward the International Space Station (ISS), carrying onboard the proteins that make up Greco's artificial retina.

"It didn't really hit me until we were sitting on the balcony at the NASA complex and seeing that rocket off in the distance," Greco recalls. "Our protein, our experiment that we've been working on for years, is on that thing."

Once the SpaceX capsule docked at the ISS, an astronaut in the station's near-weightless environment was to initiate an experiment that Greco hoped would help him understand how to improve the artificial retina's function. Back on Earth, he and his colleagues had been making progress with the retina—essentially a small film covered in hundreds of layers of the microbial light-activated protein bacteriorhodopsin—but were struggling to produce consistently high-quality retinas.

The team suspected that the bacteriorhodopsin proteins should be oriented the same way with respect to one another for the artificial retina to create robust electrical signals and communicate effectively with patients' neurons. But the team's process of dipping the film into protein solutions seemed to generate somewhat disordered protein arrangements. Greco suspected that gravity was negatively affecting the layering process—for instance, by causing the proteins in the solution to undergo sedimentation, he explains. To test that hypothesis, he and his colleagues sent materials…

Katarina Zimmer

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