NASA promotes space research as a tool to combat cancer | WORLD

2024-03-25 00:30:00

Experiments in the gravity-free environment of space, where cells age faster, have led to “impressive progress” in the fight against cancer, say officials at NASA, which is working hard to combat the disease.

Space is “a unique place for research,” astronaut Frank Rubio said at a recent event in Washington.

This doctor and former military helicopter pilot conducted cancer research on his recent mission to the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits about 400 kilometers above Earth.

There, cells not only age more quickly, accelerating research, but their structures are also described as “purer.”

“Not all of them clump together (as they do) on Earth due to gravity. “They are suspended in space,” allowing better analysis of their molecular structures, Bill Nelson, director of NASA, explained in an interview.

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Research in space can help develop more effective drugs against cancer, Nelson added.

The pharmaceutical giant Merck has done research on the ISS with the drug called Keytruda, which is currently given to patients intravenously.

Its key ingredient is difficult to transform into a liquid state. One solution is crystallization, a process often used in drug manufacturing.

Experiments

In 2017, Merck conducted experiments to see if such crystals could form more quickly in space, rather than on Earth.

Through two photographs, Nelson showed that smaller, more uniform crystals were forming in space. “They were training better,” said the NASA chief.

Thanks to that study, researchers will be able to make a drug that can be administered with an injection in the doctor’s office instead of through a long and painful chemotherapy treatment, he explained.

Merck has identified techniques that can help it mimic the effects of these crystals on Earth as it works to develop a drug that can be stored at room temperature.

Still, it may take years for a drug developed from research in space to become widely available.

Cancer research in space began more than 40 years ago but has only recently become “revolutionary,” said Nelson, a former Democratic senator who traveled to outer space in 1986.

“We use the languages ​​of space to indicate the boundaries of cancer,” added W. Kimryn Rathmell, director of the National Cancer Institute, a federally funded research agency.

“Moonshot”

President Joe Biden launched the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative in 2016 when he was vice president of the United States, echoing former President John F. Kennedy’s speech, some 60 years earlier, that described the audacious goal of sending an American to the Moon. .

The goal of “Moonshot” is to cut the cancer death rate in half over the next quarter century, saving four million lives, according to the White House.

The battle against cancer, the second cause of death in the country after heart disease, touches directly on Biden, who lost his son Beau to brain cancer in 2015.

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“We all know someone – and many of us love someone – who has fought this terrible disease,” Xavier Becerra, Secretary of Health and Human Services, told reporters at the NASA facilities on Thursday.

“As we did in the race to the Moon,” he added, “we believe that our technology and the scientific community are capable of making the impossible a reality when it comes to ending cancer as we know it.”

However, political realities may hinder that ambitious goal. Congress has allocated just over $25 billion to NASA by 2024, 2% less than the previous year and well below what the White House was seeking. Rathmell, of the National Cancer Institute, remains hopeful.

“The ability of space to capture the imagination is enormous,” he said. And space cancer research has a firm goal: “It can save lives.”

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