Pharma Looks to Outer Space to Boost Drug R&D

There are benefits of studying certain biological processes under microgravity, but whether those advantages outweigh the costs of getting experiments off Earth remains to be seen.

katya katarina zimmer
| 9 min read

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ABOVE: MODIFIED FROM: © ISTOCK.COM, VIDOSLAVA; ANASTASIA USENKO

On a cool December afternoon in 2018, on a viewing platform at the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral in Florida, Jordan Greco watched his research project leave planet Earth. As chief scientific officer of the Connecticut-based biotech LambdaVision, he had spent years developing a protein-based artificial retina to treat patients blinded or severely visually impaired by retinal degenerative diseases. At 1:15 PM that day, a Falcon 9 launch rocket lit up the sky as it blasted the SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft toward the International Space Station (ISS), carrying onboard the proteins that make up Greco’s artificial retina.

“It didn’t really hit me until we were sitting on the balcony at the NASA complex and seeing that rocket off in the distance,” Greco recalls. “Our protein, our experiment that we’ve been working on for years, is on that thing.”

Once the SpaceX ...

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Meet the Author

  • katya katarina zimmer

    Katarina Zimmer

    After a year teaching an algorithm to differentiate between the echolocation calls of different bat species, Katarina decided she was simply too greedy to focus on one field. Following an internship with The Scientist in 2017, she has been happily freelancing for a number of publications, covering everything from climate change to oncology.

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