An HIV/Aids drug has been created at a lab in Earth’s orbit, while other space-based missions aim to revolutionise cancer treatments – but why go extraterrestrial?
When you hear the phrase “space drugs” you might think of the spice melange that grants prophetic powers to Paul Atreides in Dune (see: Timothée Chalamet with his eyes stained blue from snorting glittery sand), or maybe the designer drugs of RoboCop or various Philip K Dick stories. The reality is, of course, slightly less glamorous, but manufacturing some drugs in space could be the future of IRL pharmaceuticals.
Some Big Pharma companies have been working on space-based drug development for a few years, in collaboration with big players like NASA, SpaceX, and the International Space Station. Now, though, a new generation of inventors and startup companies has emerged with a specific focus on making out-of-this-world drug development a reality. Some have even sent experiments into orbit, and returned their successful space drug payloads back to Earth.
Does this mean that we’ll all be taking interplanetary hallucinogens or cosmic coke any time soon? Sadly, no. However, it could help reduce the cost of life-saving drugs and revolutionise medical treatments, with current trials focusing on cancer drugs and the HIV/AIDS medication ritonavir.
Read more about the latest space drug experiments, and how they could revolutionise life-saving healthcare, below.
WHAT KIND OF DRUGS ARE THEY COOKING IN SPACE?
In the long run, the aim is to develop processes that can help develop a broad range of drugs in Earth’s orbit and beyond, but right now we’re still in the testing phase, which only involves developing a few select types. Just recently, for example, the California-based research company Varda Space – which specialises in manufacturing “unique products” in microgravity and returning them to Earth – announced that it successfully ran its first pharmaceutical process aboard a capsule named W-1. The output? A form of the HIV/Aids medication ritonavir.
That’s not all, though. Another company working to develop and scale up drug factories in space is BioOrbit, a UK start-up founded in 2023. For BioOrbit, space’s microgravity environment presents the perfect opportunity to develop drugs for immunotherapy, a promising method when it comes to fighting cancer.
WHY NOT JUST DO IT ON EARTH?
Needless to say, blasting things into space is very expensive (at least for now). Why invest all those resources on developing drugs when you could just do it right here on Earth? The answer is gravity. More accurately, the lack of gravity. In orbit, objects are subject to microgravity – see: astronauts floating around on the ISS – and, in the case of drug development, this can make a big difference.
We’re excited to share the results of our first pharmaceutical process in microgravity today.
— Varda Space Industries (@VardaSpace) March 20, 2024
Our processing hardware performed flawlessly.
Our mission is to now enable cost-effective high-cadence access to enable next-generation therapeutics.
Our results and pre-print below:
WHAT HAPPENS IN MICROGRAVITY?
In near-weightless conditions, crystallisation – a vital part of the drug manufacturing process – happens very differently. Without the planet’s gravitational pull, which can cause imperfections and fluctuations in size, the crystals in a drug can be custom-made to come out “small and uniform” or “large and ordered”, as explained by Varda. BioOrbit is trying to achieve a similar thing, creating a solution of tiny crystals to enable the production of new and improved immunotherapy drugs.
THE CRYSTALS – WHAT DO THEY DO?
According to BioOrbit, the formation of tiny crystals in microgravity will help develop cancer drugs with a much lower viscosity. Potentially, this would transform immunotherapy treatments, because the drugs could be injected under a patient’s skin at a convenient location, in contrast to the current intravenous method, which is long, invasive, and involves hours waiting in a hospital.
This serves as an illustration of how making drugs in space could increase “patient compliance”, or people’s receptiveness to taking drugs when they’re ill (especially in situations where the stakes are slightly lower). There are other benefits, too, though. For example, Varda points out that the resulting drugs could have an increased shelf-life, improved bioavailability – the amount of the drug that enters circulation and actually takes effect – and better efficiency, which should mean lower costs.
SO WHEN ARE SPACE DRUGS HITTING THE PHARMACY?
Drug development takes a very long time, and spots on spacecraft are very limited – all of this combined means that your drugs probably won’t be going to the moon and back in the near future. However, if we continue to launch hundreds of satellites and spacecraft every year, and build out research infrastructure in Earth’s orbit and on the moon, who knows? Maybe space drugs aren’t as far away as we think. Hopefully we’ll see the benefits back on Earth, at least enough to tide us over until we can travel the universe and find a source of spice.