MicroQuin, a biotechnology startup, used the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory to grow 3D breast and prostate cancer cell cultures to learn more about how these cancers develop and grow. 

Via MicroQuin's ISS National Lab-sponsored research, its team identified microgravity-induced changes in cancer cells signaling, indicating that cancer cell survival depends on their ability to regulate changes in their intracellular environment. 

As part of MicroQuin's research efforts, the team crystallized a protein called TMB1M6 that plays a role in regulating cells' intracellular environment and determined its structure.

Based on this new data, MicroQuin developed a small molecule therapeutic that binds to TMB1M6 and changes how cancer cells regulate intracellular environment changes, causing the cells to die.

According to the research team, TMB1M6 is only activated in cancer cells, therefore, the therapeutic does no harm to healthy cells.

Additionally, when MicroQuin researchers tested the therapeutic in the lab, they found it worked for all types of cancer.

The company also found that the findings around intracellular environment regulation could apply to other conditions, such as neurodegenerative diseases, traumatic brain injury and viral infection.

In a recent article in Upward, the official magazine of the ISS National Lab, MicroQuin founder and CEO Scott Robinson said, "What we’re seeing is that at the heart of every disease or injury, you have an intracellular environment change, and if you can alter how a disease changes the cell’s intracellular environment, you can either fully stop the disease or slow its progression."

Amelia Smith, ISS National Lab science communications manager, added, "Discoveries in space are not just achievements on a space station,” she said in the perspective piece, “they are breakthroughs that could lead to a world where families like mine are filled with hope instead of fear in the face of cancer and other devastating diseases."

MicroQuin’s research was backed by the Technology in Space Prize, funded by the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), which manages the ISS National Lab. Boeing in partnership with the MassChallenge startup accelerator program also backed the project.

THE LARGER TREND

In August, the ISS National Lab and NASA announced the National Lab Research Announcement (NLRA), which offered up to $4 million spread out over two to three awards for projects that leverage the space environment and technology to create therapies for diseases on Earth. 

The joint solicitation honed in on projects that provide improved models to study the onset and progression of diseases and address population and disease heterogeneity, drug screening and development, drug delivery, nanotechnology, drug resistance and toxicity.

In 2021, Inspiration4, an all-civilian commercial space mission, planned a launch to conduct a variety of experiments to test the impact of spaceflight on the body. The data collected would be added to an open repository for researchers to use to study the impact of spaceflight on the human body. The mission launched in Sept. 2021. 

In a study published in the June edition of Nature titled "Molecular and physiological changes in the SpaceX Inspiration4 civilian crew," study authors concluded, "Overall, these preliminary civilian spaceflight data suggest that short-duration missions do not pose a significant health risk, and moreover present a rich opportunity to measure the earliest phases of adaptation to spaceflight in the human body at anatomical, cellular, physiological and cognitive levels. Finally, these methods and results lay the foundation for an open, rapidly expanding biomedical database for astronauts, which can inform countermeasure development for both private and government-sponsored space missions."