Biomaterials
focus in on given topic areas and bring in a much larger group of experts.”
The next quest
The result was the publication of two white papers, with more in the pipeline, and the establishment of a four-stage roadmap to regenerative medicine biomanufacturing in space: 1. Disease modelling; 2. More effective stem cells and stem-cell-derived products; 3. Manufacturing, or 3D printing, or biomaterial, or device assembly – “its kind of a larger catch-all,” Wagner says; and 4. Automation, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. That last outcome – “getting the human out of the process as much as possible, and bringing in as much robotics and artificial intelligence as possible” – is “probably the most pronounced bottleneck,” Wagner says, but “it seems like we can do this”. And then once the data is out there, he explains, they can “really nail down what it is that a stem cell does differently, or what an organoid does differently. Then I think […] you can more convincingly answer the question of what we’re going to make of that”.
Bringing in robotics and AI to shore up the data is the missing link: if the data can be mined more effectively, then this promising research can be translated into measurable outcomes, and that’s when the necessary investment follows. And Wagner is confident that it will. “Access to space is kind of like the railroads coming through in the Western US,” he says. “It used to be that you would ride on an oxen-pulled wagon – and it was dangerous, and you’d run out of water, and it was a very long and arduous journey. And then they laid the rail tracks and suddenly everyone could get there; and then the plane and the automobile and the interstate highway system came in behind that. We’re going through this market change in accessibility now, particularly with low-earth orbit.” Wagner’s Wild West analogy for this new frontier may have an essence of Star Trek about it, but this is not science fiction. “It’s classic macroeconomic theory,” he says. “You lower the barrier, so more things can get over, more entrepreneurial ideas can happen. Now, the most compelling business model in 2022 appears to be space tourism. There are billionaires who are willing to pay millions of dollars, even for a few minutes [in space], and if you had something like a space hotel on one of the stations, then people would pay lots of money [to stay there].”
A new frontier The knock-on effect, Wagner explains, is that once money from space tourism begins to trickle in, a portion will be invested in scientific research. “The
Medical Device Developments /
www.nsmedicaldevices.com 1985 The year The
McGowan Institute implanted one of the first artificial hearts into a patient.
The McGowan Institute
money that gets paid supports that infrastructure, and then that infrastructure allows us to do other things. One of the models for a private space station that’s [currently] being built,” he says, “includes space tourism, but it also has biological labs, and the vision is that companies will be interested in leasing out these laboratories to do the types of work we’ve been talking about.” It may be many decades before we see bioprinters stowed away in a spaceship’s first aid kit – but the future of manufacturing biomaterials in microgravity for use in regenerative medicine on Earth is not only bright – it’s close. “The future of this research looks brilliant,” Moroni says. “It will be a field of exciting discoveries, where we should be able to take advantage of all the technological expertise of space experts on one side, and of the conditions that space offers to study ageing [on the other] – which is a much-needed topic of study for our ageing society.” Like Wagner, Tabury is confident that greater commercialisation will speed this process up. In the next five years, with more private companies being granted access to the ISS laboratories, we could see biomanufacturing being rolled out as an effective means of drugs testing. “Take a cancer patient for instance,” Tabury says. “We don’t know what kind of drug will be the most effective, but if we can take these cells and generate different kinds of organoid, then we could have 10 different drugs being tested at the same time.” Wagner’s forecast is a little more conservative: “In the next decade or so” he says, “I think, absolutely, things are going to happen. 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 define and protect those business models. Its a land rush – a new frontier is opening up.” ●
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