- 4 years ago
18 November 2022
Research into the impact of space and gravity on the human body and disease is both impacting the development of new therapies and could pave the way for accelerating future medicines, according to Dr Joshua Chou, CEO of EXPLOR Space Technologies and senior lecturer at Sydney University of Technology.
Giving the plenary speech at the inaugural APPA/MAPS Medical Affairs conference in Sydney on Thursday, Dr Chou said microgravity had already influenced medicines, naming Amgen’s anti-osteoporotic therapy EVENITY (romosozumab) and MSD’s cancer therapy KEYTRUDA (pembrolizumab) as drugs that had benefited from space technology.
He said as cells age faster in space, it enabled accelerated drug development and research. In the case of Keytruda, a protein crystallisation process that occurs in space was used to reduce the time to deliver an infusion of the drug from 12 hours to one hour, while Evenity relied on samples returned from space and developed to prevent bone loss in astronauts.
“Bone loss and osteoporosis are very similar conditions down here on earth, so they were very successful in being able to develop and translate that research into a clinical anti-osteoporotic drug,” he said. “This is a really significant breakthrough.”
Dr Chou said the two therapies were “prime examples of how we translate space research into the clinical space”.
“Bone loss is the one we know most about but there are other physiological changes that respond really aggressively in space,” he said. “They occur very differently and in different timeframes and similarly when astronauts come back down to earth, the re-adaptation to gravity is also very different.”
Dr Chou said while space research previously focused on rockets and satellites, more and more it is turning to human biology and issues such as how it impacts the female reproductive system given more female astronauts are going into space, or how to manage the respiratory impact of moondust.
“We have great plans to go the moon or to Mars but suddenly we have realised, we actually don’t know that much, and we have to accelerate a lot of research about how we do that,” he said.
While it is not feasible to test every drug in space, this “high risk, high reward” area of research has huge potential for accelerating or repurposing drugs using a microgravity ‘simulator’ developed in Australia by Dr Chou using NASA technology.
“We’re living in an era where artificial intelligence and drug discovery is a very big thing,” he said. “There are a lot of pharmaceutical companies developing AI pipeline and platform processes to accelerate or repurpose drugs and this is where microgravity research can come in.”
Dr Chou said AI needed targets and microgravity could be used to identify those targets. For example, in glioblastoma, the blood-brain barrier prevents therapies from entering the brain and reaching tumours, but microgravity has been shown to penetrate the barrier and significantly lower the number of glioblastoma cells, making them more rounded and slower.
“We’ve actually identified the mechanism of how to slow it down,” he said. “We’re currently using a lot of high-performance computing power to really understand the mechanisms of how to limit their movement under microgravity conditions.
“Under microgravity, the blood-brain barrier can be open, and this is really great in understanding how the blood-brain barrier opens and closes. If we can control it to a certain degree, then we can complement it with therapeutic treatments as well.
“Right now, we’re just understanding more on that mechanism and how to open it in the hope of being able to develop a more effective treatment.”
Dr Chou said in studying moondust, it may also be possible to find a solution to common respiratory illnesses caused by dust on earth.
“Moondust sticks to everything and is a very big challenge, a big thing that we need to be able to address before we have human establishment on the moon,” he said.
“This is very similar to earth where we have a lot of dust particles. How are we able to use that technology to translate and understand more about the respiratory system down here on earth?
“A lot of people say we’re doing research to support human space exploration in this extreme environment, but earth is becoming an extreme environment as well, so in essence, we’re supporting and preparing ourselves for the extreme environment that the earth is becoming.
“How do we take an out-of-this-world approach to what’s happening down here on earth?”
©MedNews 2022