Biomaterials
microgravity, everything is floating, so you can more accurately recreate the three dimensions of the organ that you are looking for,” he says. The thought of rocketing into space to manufacture human organs on a 3D printer sounds like the stuff of science fiction – but it is fast becoming a viable reality. Companies like Techshot, which operates its own research and manufacturing equipment on board the International Space Station (ISS) US National Laboratory, has already developed a space-based biomanufacturing platform, capable of printing with live human and animal cells. Though still at the proof-of-concept stage, there is mounting pressure to get this technology up and running by 2031: the year NASA has earmarked to send humans back to the moon. There’s a poetic duality to this research: space makes the printing of organoids possible; and the printing of organoids makes deeper and longer space travel a more viable possibility. “On the ISS,” Tabury explains, “we are still within the protection of the Van Allen Belts, so radiation levels are relatively low. But if you take [astronauts] further – to go to the moon or to Mars – and something happens to them, they cannot just go to the hospital. The further you go from Earth, the less contact you have with people on Earth, because there is a big delay in response time; and you are limited to the amount of storage that you can take with you.” With the proper expertise on board, this biofabrication technology could, in theory, remove some of the major healthcare barriers to deep space travel.
“There’s a lot of intellectual property to be obtained by experiments in microgravity, and whoever has the best, biggest footprint in low-earth orbit, and is able to explore, is going to be able to defi ne and protect those business models.”
William Wagner
Light years away Right now, however, we’re a long way from printing organs that can be transplanted into a human body: Techshot and other companies are beginning to manufacture in vitro human organ models – rather than transplantable organs – which could help to advance the field of regenerative medicine back on Earth. “When we think about space travel in the long run,” Professor Lorenzo Moroni, chair of the Complex Tissue Regeneration department and vice-director of MERLN, notes, “you could imagine that a bioprinter
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on board a spaceship going to Mars, or bringing a first colony to the Moon, could offer first aid for travellers” – but this is a dream for the distant future. For now, Moroni says, “biofabrication, as a broader domain of science, is one of the technology platforms used to create new regenerative medicine therapies on Earth”. In other words, these complex organoids provide a fertile testing ground – and exposing them to the conditions of space could provide new avenues for medical research. “In space,” Moroni explains, “microgravity is known to age our body. So [biomanufacturing] could be used to study ageing in an accelerated manner, compared with what happens on Earth. Similarly, cosmic radiation could be seen as an accelerated environment of ageing on Earth, when we are exposed to radiation for long [periods of] time. Hence, space could be used as an environment in which we can study ageing on a faster time scale, which would otherwise take years or even decades on Earth.”
The real barrier to getting this kind of research off the ground isn’t so much the technology itself – companies like Techshot are already providing proof of concept – but the funding. “The key thing that’s missing,” explains Professor William Wagner, director of the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, “is the viable business model that would bring in the investment. In our field, and in our institute, we discover things, we file lots of patents, but we know that to get to market it takes hundreds of millions of dollars in devices – if not billions – and that’s not going to come from a government. And its not going to come from a non-profit.”
The McGowan Institute has been at the forefront of developing technologies that address organ and tissue failure for the past 30 years – they implanted one of the first artificial hearts into a human patient as early as 1985 – and Wagner has witnessed the importance of investment first-hand. “When I started [at McGowan] in the early 90s, artificial heart technology was extremely expensive, and insurance companies wouldn’t approve it. Fast forward to now, and it’s much less expensive, and far more broadly available.”
Back in late 2019, the ISS National Laboratory contacted the McGowan Institute for help in furthering their mission to advance the nation’s leadership in commercial space. McGowan drew up plans for a three-day conference, which would bring together thought-leaders from around the country to assess the data and determine which topic areas would be most likely to translate to clinical impact – and then Covid-19 struck. “The pandemic had a very causative effect,” Wagner says, “because it cancelled that workshop and gave us the ability to stretch [discussions] out over many months and to really
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