Cancer wellness may more alien than you might think, as researchers have said that advanced strategies to fight cancer are taking inspiration from experiments in the final frontier of outer space. Cell behaviour is usually masked by responses to gravity, and so researchers can study this behaviour in conditions mirroring the gravity experienced in low-Earth orbit – a gravitational pull 10,000 to 1 million times less powerful than that felt on Earth’s surface.
In the case of cancer, cells can malfunction, which is why learning more about these processes is shedding light on potential treatments. According to cell biologist Jeanne Becker of Nano3D Biosciences in Houston, ‘When you take away the force of gravity, you can unmask some things you can’t readily see on Earth. When gravitational force is reduced, cell shape changes, the way they grow changes, the genes they activate change, the proteins they make change.’
The first US space station, known as Skylab, was the setting for the first experiments into the effects of gravity on cells. In the 1970s, researchers there discovered that red blood cells develop bumpy surfaces in space, but this change disappeared within hours once astronauts returned to Earth. More recently, researchers found that the behaviour of 1,632 out of the 10,000 genes studied – which included genes linked with cell death and tumour suppression — was altered in microgravity.
The problem with studying cells on earth – aside from microgravity – is that conventional research procedures affect the way that the cell would normally act. Cells are often grown as flat layers in dishes, but this obscures how they behave in real life when they can interact with each other in three dimensions in complex ways. Becker explained, ‘When you grow cancers in three dimensions as opposed to flat layers, their response to drugs is vastly different — they become more resistant to drugs.’
Therefore, devices have been created in order to mimic the effects of microgravity on Earth. As Becker and her colleague Glauco Souza detailed online in the journal Nature Reviews Cancer, ‘The work we do can help address how cancer grows, reveal new ways of tackling drug resistance.’ She added, ‘With the International Space Station, we have a lab that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s an exciting platform for discovery.’
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