Researcher Dhruv Sareen’s stem cells arrived on the International Space Station (ISS) on a supply ship sent by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, which is trying to find new ways to mass-produce stem cells. Stem cells are induced pluripotent stem cells, meaning they can differentiate into almost any other type of cell found in the body and have the potential to treat a variety of diseases. So far, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has only approved blood-forming stem cell therapies for patients with blood disorders such as lymphoma, with stem cells derived from umbilical cord blood. Stem cells sent into space could be used for futuristic therapies to treat conditions such as type 1 diabetes, macular degeneration, Parkinson’s disease or damage from heart attacks. “With current technology right now, even if the FDA were to immediately approve some of these treatments, we don’t have the ability to make [what’s needed],” said Jeffrey Millman, a biomedical engineering specialist at Washington University in St. Louis. Stem cells are usually grown in large bioreactors on Earth, where they must be constantly stirred to avoid clumping and sinking to the bottom of the tank. The stress of these conditions causes many cells to die. “At zero G, there’s no force on the cells, so they can just grow in a different way,” said Clive Svendsen, executive director of Cedars-Sinai’s Regenerative Medicine Institute. NASA is funding the Cedars-Sinai team’s experiment to grow stem cells in space for four weeks. The team will also run the same experiment simultaneously on Earth before a SpaceX capsule returns the cells from the space experiment to Earth for the team to analyze. According to Svenden, the impact of producing billions of these cells in orbit “could be enormous.”
