Space to grow antibiotics
NASA has gone into partnership with a pharmaceutical company to find cheaper ways to make antibiotics — in space.
This week's launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis will carry an experiment to investigate why bacteria seem to grow more quickly — and produce more antibiotics — in space than they do on the ground.
The project is supported by BioServe Space Technologies, a collaboration between NASA and Bristol-Myers Squibb, and hopes to eventually increase yields of antibiotics on Earth.
Researchers first noticed in 1968 that microbes cultured in space grew better than on Earth. Experiments by Bristol-Myers Squibb in the mid-1990s revealed that under certain conditions — in test tubes or gas-permeable bags — they also produced up to 200 per cent more antibiotics.
According to David Klaus, who heads the BioServe study, one possible reason for the difference could be gravity — or rather, the lack of it.
On Earth, gravity causes fluid surrounding the bacteria to circulate. Heavier fluids fall, and lighter fluids rise.
Without gravity, there might be less mixing and that could affect the metabolic activity of the bacteria.
Researchers speculate that bacteria produce vitamins, enzymes, or other 'cofactors' either inside or around the cells, and it's only when enough of these have accumulated that the cells will begin to multiply.
If there is reduced mixing in space, the concentration of these cofactors may increase more quickly, causing cells to proliferate and produce more antibiotics.
But antibiotics are also produced in response to stress. In space, said Klaus, stress might simply result from the altered environment around the cell.
Alternatively, the overproduction of antibiotics might reflect some unknown change within the cell itself.
To try and control for some of these factors, the BioServe experiments employ a device known as MOBIAS: the Mulitple Orbital Bioreactor with Instrumentation and Automated Sampling.
This provides bacteria with roughly the same environment whether they are in space or on the ground, and use diffusion, not gravity, to mix the gases and nutrients.
If the bacteria do overproduce and researchers can figure out why, those factors could be mimicked in terrestrial facilities. Even a tiny increase in production efficiency, Klaus explained, would be very significant commercially: one estimate holds that each one per cent increase in efficiency would save around six million dollars annually in antibiotic production costs.
MOBIAS will be carried to the International Space Station on the Space Shuttle Atlantis on NASA mission STS-110. The mission will also deliver the components for a 'space railway' around the station.
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