A memorial day weekend, a new beginning & a look into the future with some exciting experiments..

Hope everyone's had a great memorial day weekend. 

It's been a complete month & bit quiet out here so thought would pen down some points floating on my mind around new research, will try not to talk about the virus as everyone's already talked a lot..

Okay - so research & innovation go hand in hand, we as humans' have been a very focussed race towards innovating & solving complex challenges around flexibility to develop faster & market to consume effectively. Our focus though has shifted time to time on prioritizing for cost to market rather than on innovating for which we all have and would be paying the price in future but for now - let's talk about pure reduction in time to market... 

A couple of fascinating projects that are those involving microgravity. 

Well, we have a launch which is very much near for a manned mission to ISS using Dragon capsule(wow - that would be really exciting!) but more interesting is the series of experiments which are basically involved with it. 

So one thing - which we all have experienced during this virus pandemic is that ability for humans to comprehend a pathogen quickly relies on a large number of factors, one being the fact that any attempt to comprehend would be accomplished only within the limitations of the gravity scenario in play for earth. 

Now what does that mean? - inspite of having supercomputers and intelligence which can pair up and sequence the RNA strands and create models to mimic the virus behaviour quickly, there is a sequence process towards development of any drug  which can be released into the market with confidence - which undergoes a set of steps - discover & development, pre-clinical research, clinical trials, government review & then on approval - manufacturing. This whole process in itself takes from a couple of months to a couple of years depending on the kind of drug for a disease or for that matter even a vaccine.

But how does space solve this problem?  - well, the answer is not space, it's micro-gravity.

How does microgravity change the flexibility around releasing a drug? - it's believed that micro-gravity - induces the ageing affect on humans, the reason being since our bodies are very much adapted to gravity, the body functions start to deteriorate at a faster rate with micro-gravity environments. 

How does that help? - well, scientists have been able to synthesise protein compounds which can mimic our organ functions on nano scale level - like for e.g. - a small kidney or liver which doesn't look like one - but functions like one, it has all the characteristics and deteriorates, reacts and works in close fashion to our actual kidney or liver. 

But how will this speed up development of drug? - well, to speed up development of drug - we need to understand fully the effects of the drug over different age groups over a long periods of time, micro-gravity helps to reduce the time factor here only if those people with different age-groups are in space and for that we have something called as  micro-physiological systems or organs on chips or tissue chips which are sent into space in the capsule as experiments which can then be studied for effects of drug and then examined for results. This shortens the time of approval of the drug and also reduces the cost & spending to that research which might not be needed and focusses attention to research which would be critical for usability of the drug.

Space Health Technologies are all about working on micro-gravity environments to get the intended results quicker.

Another useful experiment is the study of how the deep space missions will impact human health by studying the human tissues and behaviour when subjected to long periods in space.. we will talk about this later.. but for now I just want to highlight how much of innovation is still in progress and there are endless possibilities here.