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Crew-12 heads home in early October after crystallising cancer-targeting drugs in orbit
NASA's Crew-12, four astronauts from NASA, ESA and Roscosmos, is due back from the space station in early October. The agency's look back sets out what the crew's experiments in drug crystallisation, bone repair and quantum physics were built to test.
The Scientist · Science desk
What happened
- The crew is NASA astronauts Jessica Meir and Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrey Fedyaev.
- According to NASA, microgravity reveals new details of crystal structures that help researchers improve the quality and stability of drugs.
- A recent upgrade to the Cold Atom Lab, where Meir worked, increases the number of ultracold atoms the facility produces.
- Hathaway also ran GEARS, sequencing DNA aboard to learn how antibiotic-resistant bacteria adapt to life in space.
- A Cygnus XL cargo craft on Northrop Grumman's CRS-24 flight brought new research, including a space-weather instrument and a gut-microbiome project.
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Why it matters
- constraint Until data on the space-grown crystals is published next to ground-grown controls, nobody outside the team can judge whether orbit improved the cancer-targeting compounds.
- capability More atoms per Cold Atom Lab run means more measurements from each experiment, in a facility where atoms already stay observable longer than they do on the ground.
- exposure Crews on long missions will share sealed craft with bacteria that survive antibiotics, starvation and disinfection, and GEARS is where NASA expects countermeasures to come from.
For the crystal work, the comparison that would settle the question is the same compound crystallised on the ground in matching hardware. NASA's account of ADSEP-PIL-15 says only that cancer-targeting treatments were crystallised aboard "to better understand their properties and help advance cancer therapies on Earth" [3]. It does not name the drug or its developer, and, like the rest of the retrospective, it reports no results [13].
Green Bone has the design I like best. Microgravity can speed up bone loss, so NASA treats the station as a harder test of whether Sophie Adenot's wooden scaffold promotes bone regeneration [6]. The scaffold is built to mimic the structure of real bone and to support the growth of bone cells [6]. NASA ties the work to osteoporosis, which it says affects more than 200 million people worldwide [7]. The thing this doesn't tell you is how the scaffold would behave inside a patient. The sample is a scaffold for bone cells in a small container [6].
The Cold Atom Lab item is about instrument capacity. In microgravity, ultracold atoms can be observed for longer than on the ground [5]. That is the physical advantage, and the upgrade adds more atoms on top of it [5]. NASA connects the extra data to quantum technologies including solar cells and the components that power phones and computers [12].
Jessica Meir also set up Colloidal Solids, which studies how tiny particles suspended in water assemble into structures differently in microgravity [8]. She worked on BEM-CARTS too, which follows engineered cartilage tissue as it develops in orbit [11]. That puts her on three of the at least six crew-tended investigations the summary describes [2] [1]. NASA says space-grown cartilage could give people with cartilage injuries a treatment that does not require transplanting cartilage from another part of the body [11].
What to watch
- Published ADSEP-PIL-15 results that compare the space-grown crystals of the cancer-targeting compound with crystals of the same compound grown on the ground.
- Green Bone data showing whether the wooden scaffold supported bone regeneration under microgravity's accelerated bone loss.
- NASA's confirmation of the exact Crew-12 departure and splashdown date in early October.