n a small lab, squeezed into the corner of a skyscraper in downtown Tel Aviv, Israeli entrepreneur Yossi Yamin is proudly holding what he calls “a little James Bond-style suitcase factory, powered by the sun”.
It is the absence of gravity that has long made space such an attractive playground for teasing apart some of biology’s intricacies. 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.
“The potential is fascinating,” says Scott Robinson, MicroQuin’s founder and CEO. “Influenza is a good example, because when the virus goes inside a cell, it changes the entire environment to be highly oxidative. But if you stop that change using TMBIMs, you can fully stop influenza infection. It could also be used as a combination therapy to sensitise cancer cells to immunotherapy.”The field of space medicine was accelerated by one of the worst disasters in Nasa’s history.
“One of the issues with monoclonal antibodies as therapeutics is that they have to be given as infusions in hospital settings every few weeks,” says Reichert, who has since advised Eli Lilly and the Michael J Fox Foundation on conducting experiments in space. “It takes several hours, while an injection takes minutes. So this not only improves the quality of life for the patient, but it could also cut the cost of the therapy.
“The quality of the cells isn’t always great,” says Clive Svendsen, executive director of the regenerative medicine institute at Ceders-Sinai in Los Angeles. “They often pick up abnormalities or grow too slowly. But the question is: can you grow a better cell in orbit?”