Controlled Therapeutic Biomanufacturing for Deep Space Missions

Microgravity, radiation, a lack of materials, and a confined environment have unprecedented detrimental effects on astronaut health. Medical therapeutics are a crucial health support system that will need to be re-evaluated for long duration space flight. Pharmaceuticals degrade from radiation, medicine can run out, and more medicine cannot be provided on demand. One option is to use a biomanufacturing platform for pharmaceutical production via synthetic biology. This platform has several advantages over contemporary mechanochemical techniques, including low mass, low power requirements, low volume, and high flexibility/ adaptability. However, a hurdle to the successful operation of this platform is the effect of the space environment, which can alter cellular production. Tight regulation of production is essential to successfully biomanufacture pharmaceuticals in the face of this dynamic environment. Therefore, I am proposing two research objectives that will bring this nascent technology from Technology Readiness Level 2 to Technology Readiness Level 4. The first objective is to use genetic circuits to regulate the biomanufacture of therapeutics in the model synthetic biology organisms Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas putida in response to dynamic space environmental conditions. The second objective is to extend this regulation of therapeutic biomanufacturing to more complex environments and hosts, namely in co-culture with lung epithelial cells, and in Lactuca sativa (lettuce). These two objectives fulfill an innovative approach to therapeutic bioproduction that is specifically tailored for space exploration, to minimize potential risks to astronauts and off-nominal health events. I believe that I am ideally suited to tackle these objectives and produce the proposed work due to my unique background that combines mathematical modeling and experimental biomedical engineering. The proposed work is significant to space research and engineering because it will lay the groundwork, and prove possible, on-demand production of therapeutics for deep space missions.

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