📍 Space Pharma: Making Drugs in Space

Shooting things into space is no longer just about rockets, satellites and launch vehicles or Chandrayaan and SpaceX and so on. There is a space frenzy and the newest happening thing is Space Pharma – the manufacturing of drugs and medicines in space. Earnings from the space economy are projected to be huge. Market professionals are anticipating that it could surpass $1 trillion by 2040. While settled industries like semiconductors and fiber-optic cables will be the biggest earners, Space Pharma is emerging as a significant player.

A number of precision drugs like monoclonal antibodies, steroids, antibiotics among many others, may now be coming from space. A number of pharmaceutical companies in recent times have been heading straight to the lower orbit of the earth to manufacture medicines. So what is the reason for going all that distance, you may ask, why not continue to produce drugs on earth as always? The answer is Microgravity. Microgravity is the state when the pull of gravity is not very strong since gravitational force gets weaker when objects are far apart. This microgravity condition is very enabling for the pharmaceutical sector as we shall see.

When pharmaceutical products are manufactured on earth, they face challenges from the force of gravity. How? because of a process called sedimentation when heavy particles settle below and smaller, lighter particles float on top. This disrupts the drug synthesis process because the mixture of compounds that goes into making a drug remains uneven. Fluids sink, making the mixture uneven. Unevenly distributed particles in compositions create problems

with dosage.

In space however, there is very low gravitational force, or micro gravity where the distortions created by gravitational force are cancelled. Better drugs can be manufactured in space by taking advantage of the microgravity conditions in low-Earth orbit. This enables the synthesis of more precise complex biological molecules and purer, more uniform protein crystals.

When molecules are more uniform, they become easier to administer to patients, When crystals are a mix of different sizes, small crystals hide in the gaps of larger ones, making the liquid thicker, more viscous. This matters because viscosity determines the efficiency with which patients absorb the medicine. Viscous injectable medicines are painful to administer, when viscosity is lowered, complex mixtures become lighter and less painful to take. 

The United States is the world leader in commercial space-based drug manufacturing and is already establishing supply chains. The US is followed by the UK which is trying to capture a dominant share of the European space-pharma market. Third in line is India a new player in the space-pharma arena.

Serendipity Space is the name of India’s first dedicated Space Pharma start-up operating out of Bhubaneshwar. The company is building satellites to manufacture pharmaceutical compounds in orbit so that drug crystals can be manufactured in microgravity. These will be brought back to produce purer forms of medicines than are possible on Earth. A futuristic, new sector is developing in medicines and it is wonderful to know that India is a major player.

 

📍ARE DESIGNER BABIES DANGEROUS ? 

Tampering with the genetics of producing babies began with Dolly the sheep who became a genetic sensation in 1996. She was cloned by a process called somatic cell nuclear transfer. In this, scientists took a cell from an adult sheep and transferred its DNA into another sheep egg cell from which the nucleus was removed. This embryo grew up to be Dolly, showing for the first time that specialized cells from an adult body could be reprogrammed to create an entirely new organism. Since then scientists have cloned over 20 other mammal species, including cattle, horses, pigs and mice and later, even monkeys.

 

We have come a long way since Dolly, via stem cell therapy and research on human embryos . The latter is governed by the globally accepted 14-Day Rule which prohibits researchers from culturing or researching live human embryos in the lab past 14 days of development. This convention was breached in 2018 by a Chinese scientist Dr. He Jiankui who secretly edited the DNA of twin embryos to make them resistant to HIV. There was an international furore when this was discovered and it led to Dr. Jiankui’s imprisonment for violating medical ethics and regulations. 

 

I have a sense that the earlier scientific outrage seems to be weakening as genetic technologies develop further and the appeal of designer babies refuses to abate. 

The new gene-editing technologies like CRISPR-Cas9 have made it even easier to alter the DNA of human embryos and produce genetically modified babies or ‘designer babies’. It is feared that this prohibited line of research is now being done covertly in more than one lab.

The main scientific goal of creating designer babies is to halt the transmission of heritable diseases but there are already whispered demands to create an infant with certain characteristics that parents consider desirable. This would be the start of the slippery slope.

Apart from grave ethical concerns, the reason why frivolous genetic alteration of the embryo is proscribed is because DNA editing of human embryos often leads to unintentional or “off-target" mutations. This will result in a “cellular mosaic”, meaning not all cells will get altered as intended. These defective changes will be passed down to all future generations, so all descendants of this “designer person” will carry the defect of the cellular mosaic. And we have no idea what impacts this will have.

 

If designer babies and designer adults become a reality in substantial numbers, we can easily imagine that the genetic and physical integrity of homo sapiens will change. How likely is it that this will happen? Hard to say. Covenants and regulations can be/ have been broken as we have seen. And there are plenty of mavericks out there wanting to go out and plant their flag on something outrageous…and forbidden.