The new frontier of cancer research is in space

In the microgravity of space, tumors can triple in size in just 10 days. That could be a boon for cancer research, and a risk for astronauts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ira Flatow?

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• 1:14Ira Flatow?

  Hi, it's Ira Flatow, and you're listening to Science Friday. Studying cancer and how tumors form is difficult. So that's why some experts are taking their research off-world.

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Five, four, three, two, one, ignition.

• 1:33Speaker 03

  And let's go SpaceX, go at IRL 172.

• 1:36Ira Flatow?

  Tumors will soon be sent to the International Space Station to see how they'll grow and change in a weightless environment. It turns out that tumors grow in space at a startling rate. What would take 10 years on Earth to triple in size in space takes just 10 days. So what does that mean for science and for the astronauts? The researchers behind those projects are here now to tell us why space is the new frontier for tumor research. Let me introduce them. Dr. Katrina Jamison is a hematologist. At the UC San Diego Health Moore's Cancer Center in California. And Dr. Minal Datta studies the physics of cancer

• 2:18Ira Flatow?

  at the University of Notre Dame's College of Engineering in Indiana. Welcome to Science Friday.

• 2:23Speaker 04

  Thanks, Ira.

• 2:24Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having us.

• 2:26Ira Flatow?

  Nice to have you. Dr. Jamison, here's the million dollar question. What's the benefit of taking cancer research to space?

• 2:34Speaker 04

  Well, I would say that's a multi-billion dollar question because if we can solve this problem, it helps all of us. One in three of us is going to get cancer at one point in our lives. And everyone will have a family member, a close friend who gets cancer. But I would say cancer is a catalyst for cancer research. Because as you mentioned, Ira, in our experiments in AXI-1, 2, 3, and 4 missions, and now what we're launching with this NASA CASIS mission, we're really aiming to see why cancer divides so quickly in space. Cancer seems to clone itself on steroids in space. So what we see is tripling in size of our tumor organoids in 10 days, when that would take 10 years on the ground to see the same thing.

• 3:15Ira Flatow?

  That is truly amazing, and we don't know why that is. Is that right?

• 3:19Speaker 04

  Well, we're getting a very good idea of why that is. So we see unleashing of what's called the dark genome. So we have repetitive DNA. What we were told in undergrad was just junk, just ignore it. These repetitive elements, vestigial viruses, leftover viral remnants in our DNA that become activated under conditions of stress. And space is a mighty stressor to stem cells, but also to cancer. And we see that activates a gene called ADAR1, which has been under our radar for a long time. And we found a drug that can block it.

• 3:56Ira Flatow?

  I'd like to get back to that a little bit later. But first, Dr. Datta, you study the physics of cancer in space. Please tell me, is it hard to grow a tumor in the lab? Does it act the same way?

• 4:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is one of the fundamental reasons that we actually use space is because when researchers such as myself try to grow tumors in the lab, we try to grow these miniature 3D tumors that we call organoids. And unfortunately, they don't form the same way that they do within the human body when we grow them in our Earth-based labs here at Notre Dame or at UC San Diego. And much of the work that's been done in space to understand that organoids and 3D structures actually grow better in space have been done by Dr. Jamison and her pioneering work over the last decade. And so that motivated us in our lab to start looking at cancer mechanics and the response of the immune system in space as well.

• 4:53Ira Flatow?

  Wow. You know, my question here is, what is there in space? Is it really the zero gravity that helps this? I mean, is that really what it is?

• 5:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, it turns out that gravity, you know, as somebody who teaches aerospace and mechanical engineering classes, we have to talk about this all the time with our students. Gravity is really a hindrance in our experiments on ground. It creates sedimentation and buoyancy and free convection that will compromise our ability to model cancer, to grow 3D tissues for regenerative medicine and other advances such as that. And so again, work by Dr. Jamison and colleagues has shown that when you escape gravity, she used this beautiful word catalyst, when you catalyze these experiments using space and the microgravity environment of space, we actually overcome those artifacts so that we can unmask some of the biology that we're missing here on ground.

• 5:50Speaker 04

  Just to add to that very clever point, when you look at what happens with metastatic cancers, those cancers that spread to other sites, it's as if they've escaped the bonds of Earth. They've escaped the bonds of their primary tissue, and they're invading and metastasizing, and they need this three-dimensional structure that allows them to go forth and multiply. And we've discovered that this sensor called PIEZ01, P-I-E-Z-O-1, which was discovered by Artem Patapoutian at Scripps in San Diego and got the Nobel Prize for that, is very important for this kind of biology. If PIEZ01 is on, the cells think they need to stay at home in their normal microenvironment or niche, but if it gets switched off, they say, hey,

• 6:35Speaker 04

  let's go forward. And that is what microgravity does as well.

• 6:40Ira Flatow?

  Wow. All right. So you've told us about how cancer cells, now cancers can grow so much faster in space. I mean, that raises the question for me that what about the safety of astronauts? Could astronauts have undetected small cancers or blood cancers that they don't know about and suddenly they go into, they go into space in zero gravity and these things get sped up so quickly? Katrina, is that not a risk?

• 7:08Speaker 04

  I think it is a risk. It's a risk for all of us on the ground as well. But in flight, so far, when you look at astronauts, they're pretty much superhuman. But for the rest of us, if we want to go up there, I think we do need to be careful about incipient malignancies, particularly blood cancers, because blood cancers can lurk in the bone marrow with very few detectable signs till quite late in the course of disease. Similarly, any cancer that tends to spread to the bone marrow would be hard to detect based on just a simple blood test. Metastatic breast cancer to the bone marrow, metastatic prostate cancer to the bone marrow. So I think it behooves us to do specialized testing. We were very

• 7:48Speaker 04

  grateful to be able to test the Acxiom crew members from Acxiom 2, 3, and 4 to see, are they getting stressed enough to actually activate inflammatory pathways that then allow incipient or precancerous lesions to become fully malignant? So we studied their stem cells and we discovered something sort of interesting. I thought it would be a Debbie Downer story where everybody ages quickly at the stem cell level as they go into flight. And the editor of Cell Stem Cell, Sheila Charlie, said, actually, that's not what you're seeing entirely. There was a resilience mechanism that seemed to be unleashed under conditions of stress in the astronauts, where they liberated a very regenerative, very

• 8:31Speaker 04

  good stem cell population to compete against the mutated stem cells. So it was sort of a clone war situation where resilience seemed to overcome that deterioration of the stem cells in the astronauts, something we didn't expect to see. But it's something we need to look at in all of us. Are we able to activate these resilience mechanisms that help to boost our immune responses against these early cancers or even precancers? And that ended up being a very exciting and surprising discovery in the Acxiom crew members.

• 9:05Ira Flatow?

  That is surprising. Meenal, are you surprised by that too?

• 9:08Speaker 05

  Well, nothing surprises me anymore in space. That's what this research has taught me. But I think Dr. Jamison raises a very important point in that, you know, research has been going on in astronauts, in biological samples in space for decades. And we are able to continue to build on those lessons learned. So for example, one of the findings that we found is that when we sent glioblastoma organoids to the space station on SpaceX 30 two years ago, we found that when we combined those cancer cells with immune cells that are present in human tumors as well, those immune cells start to behave the same way that they do in the human body. They actually are reprogrammed by the cancer cells to help the cancer grow rather than

• 9:53Speaker 05

  to fight against it. And interestingly, those same molecular programs are turned on in astronauts in their circulating immune cells, indicating the suppressed immune system that has implications for multiple diseases. So all of that is to say that actually, space biomedicine allows us to better understand diseases here on Earth, even when we're looking at two totally different disease profiles.

• 10:17Ira Flatow?

  Dr. Jamison, you said earlier that your research has led to some treatment breakthroughs. Please tell me about that.

• 10:25Speaker 04

  Yes. So that drug is called ribexinib, named after Rebecca Moore's, and it is a cancer kill switch. So if you're not growing, you're dying. We discovered that it stopped the tumor organoids from growing in our Axiom 3 launch. And then we did Axiom 4 to test a number of tumor types, including the deadliest form of brain cancer called glioblastoma multiforme, the deadliest form of acute myeloid leukemia called secondary acute myeloid leukemia, the deadliest form of breast cancer, metastatic breast cancer, and ovarian cancer. So we saw that that gene was upregulated in all four of those, and they are sensitive

• 11:06Speaker 04

  to this drug, ribexinib, which just finished its site initiation visit for the Phase 1 clinical trial at the Moore's Cancer Center at UC San Diego.

• 11:15Ira Flatow?

  So was this made possible, finding this drug that will stop the switch that turns on all these tumors? Was this possible because you brought the tumors into space?

• 11:28Speaker 04

  We had already got enough data for myelofibrosis, a preleukemic but pretty serious disorder, and then secondary acute myeloid leukemia on the ground. But what NASA allowed us to do on the International Space Station is to see for other tumor types, whether they rely on this. Is this the Achilles heel for a broader array of cancers beyond blood cancers? And I'm a hematologist, so I always focus on the blood.

• 11:52Ira Flatow?

  Right.

• 11:53Speaker 04

  But in this case, we said, wait, maybe this is a bigger deal. And indeed, NASA allowed us to accelerate the research in other cancers. So as we move forward, we would like to actually start a Phase 1b2 clinical trial for all ADAR-activated malignancies based on space being a catalyst for cancer research and giving us these data that allow us to look across a spectrum of cancers. So that was only made possible in this short timeframe because of space.

• 12:23Ira Flatow?

  We have to take a quick break, but don't go anywhere. We've got lots more when we come back.

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• 13:58Speaker 07

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• 14:12Ira Flatow?

  Meenal, I know you study a cancer that has no cure, and I'm talking about glioblastoma. Are you hopeful that doing research in space might help unlock the key to figuring this thing out?

• 14:25Speaker 05

  I am very hopeful. You know, as an engineer, I think we're really attracted by these unsolvable problems, and glioblastoma is certainly one of them. And I really applaud Dr. Jamison and her colleagues for being willing to welcome a non-traditional oncology researcher into their space, their research space and real space as well, such as myself. And I do think that bringing sort of outside thoughts will open up some of this research as well. You know, Dr. Jamison has already explained very nicely that space is accelerating our research and accelerating our pathway to cures, cutting down years or decades of research into a fraction of the time. And so I have no doubt that glioblastoma

• 15:08Speaker 05

  will benefit from the work that she and others have sort of laid the groundwork for myself and newer researchers to build on. So what we will be sending in SpaceX 34, also with Spacetango, who is our implementation partner as well, are patient-derived glioblastoma organoids, where we hope to better understand how their disease progressed, why they resist treatment. And we will uncover additional targets beyond ADAR and similar pathways for testing as well. Our future flights later this year and beyond will be focused on drug testing against these patient-derived organoids as well. And to go to your question, Ira,

• 15:52Speaker 05

  About sort of what does the future hold for this? You know, we have seen in this area that we're now on the cusp of this commercial space era, moving forward into a new era and decade of research beyond the International Space Station, beyond sort of these one-off investigations. And so as more commercial opportunities become available, this becomes an actual viable pipeline for research to discovery to clinical care.

• 16:19Ira Flatow?

  When you say commercializing this, does that mean you would send up just floating laboratories in orbit that you would do your research in? And would they be personed by astronauts or would they be autonomous?

• 16:32Speaker 04

  I think both matter. I think natural intelligence trumps AI every time because we learn things as a networked way of doing business, so to speak. Also, our neural stem cells are regenerative. So we learn and then we amplify that learning together. So so far, I think humans are beating machines. What we do in the Cube Lab with Space Tango is a deeper dive into the molecular biology of what we're looking at. So we did drug testing with Acxiom. This one that we're launching to SpaceX 34 with Space Tango is compared to metastatic breast cancer. So glioblastoma multiforme, highly invasive, nasty tumor activates ADAR. But what else is being fed to it by the

• 17:16Speaker 04

  surrounding so-called niche cells? And then similarly for metastatic breast cancer, does that behave differently? So we're going to see in flight what happens in the human body when the immune system just isn't working in your favor. And this is how our two experiments are really connected. And I would say we're going to meet in the middle. Right, Meena?

• 17:36Speaker 05

  I fully agree.

• 17:38Ira Flatow?

  I noticed that, Dr. Jameson, you're a hematologist. I mean, what other kinds of blood illnesses might be amenable for space medicine?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it's so interesting that you asked that question and Minnie was actually alluding to this. We see these inflammatory disorders. Think of autoimmune disorders where you unleash this inflammatory cascade from your stem cells and your immune cells. And it actually starts from our stem cells that give rise to all the immune cells. When they go awry, you can actually fuel autoimmune disease or neuroinflammatory disorders, not just MS, but neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson's disease that affect 1.2 million people in this country and also multiple system atrophy, which my dad actually had. So what we find is that the stem cells under conditions of stress, inordinate stress,

• 18:29Speaker 04

  but also in conditions like space, for example, that unleash this inflammatory cascade, that seems to lead to neurodegeneration. So I think we'll learn a lot about, you know, all the processes that have to do with aging that we'd like to predict, prevent, and hopefully reverse if they've already happened. And this is not good aging. This is abnormal aging.

• 18:51Ira Flatow?

  Right. One last question for you, Minnie. Tell me what it's like to see your specimens launched. Do you feel like you're sending your kids off to school for the first time?

• 19:02Speaker 05

  You know, I do think that actually the more fun part is sending my students down to Kennedy Space Center, to Cape Canaveral, because I literally feel like I'm launching these trainees into their future as space engineers who are no doubt going to work in this area. So I'm just as excited to see the students go down as the science.

• 19:24Ira Flatow?

  What a great place to end. I want to thank you both for taking time to be with us today. Dr. Minnie Data studies the physics of cancer at the University of Notre Dame's College of Engineering. Dr. Katrina Jamison is a hematologist at the UC San Diego Health Morris Cancer Center in California. Good luck to both of you in your research.

• 19:45Speaker 04

  Thanks, Ira.

• 19:46Speaker 05

  Thank you, Ira.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Go for lunch.

• 19:48Ira Flatow?

  This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you're loving the show, let us know by giving us a five star rating. We'll be back again tomorrow. See you then. I'm Ira Flatow.