STS-135, the final NASA space shuttle mission, is about half complete. As a child of the space age (I was born in 1969, perhaps the most venerable year in space exploration history) and a science fiction fan, I’ve closely followed these missions since the beginning — from watching Enterprise ride atop a jetliner and glide to its first landing when I was 7 . . . to crying over the Challenger explosion on TV while I was home sick from school at 16. . . to staring in shock at images of Columbia’s disintegration on reentry just a few years ago. My happiest memories of the Space Transportation System (STS) come from the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I worked as a secretary for a United Technologies Hamilton Standard department involved in life-support systems engineering. We used to wheel out the TVs and stop work to watch every launch together — the most exciting of those missions being for deployment of the Galileo probe to Jupiter in 1989 and the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.

What a pleasant surprise it was less than a decade later, when after college I learned in my work as an editor for a biopharmaceutical trade magazine that this new industry I covered had its own connections to the space program. We all know that NASA-originated technologies have found their way into numerous parts of our economy; just watch the “It Came from Outer Space” episode of Modern Marvels on the History Channel for a brief review. But for something a little closer to home, consider the protein crystallization experiments in microgravity, 3-D bioreactors for cell/tissue culture, and recent studies of C. elegans. Even this final mission includes stem cell experiments for Tissue Genesis Inc. and vaccine research for Cheryl Nickerson and Roy Curtiss III at Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute.

Nickerson, a microbiologist and authority on infectious pathogens, has been using space-based experiments since 1998 for investigating the processes of infection. From earlier mission research, her team demonstrated that conditions of microgravity such as aboard the space shuttle can increase the virulence of microbes such as Salmonella. They found that spaceflight altered pathogen gene expression, and they discovered a “master switch” regulating that response.

"Our earlier work showed the potential for spaceflight to provide novel insight into the mechanisms of microbial virulence that may lead to innovations in infectious disease control here on Earth," she said.

As director of the Biodesign Institute's Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology, Curtiss engineered an experimental vaccine strain to fly aboard Atlantis on its current journey to the International Space Station. By removing the disease-causing components of Salmonella and incorporating a key protective antigen from Streptococcus pneumoniae, he created a powerful oral vaccine against pneumonia that has shown promise in phase 1 human clinical trials. The focus of this current research is the ability of spaceflight to enhance the efficacy of this recombinant attenuated Salmonella vaccine (RASV). This builds on decades of earlier research by Nickerson and Curtiss, in attempts to improve the effectiveness of RASVs, which exploit Salmonella’s renowned infectious capacity to produce a strong, system-wide immune response.

"Many breakthroughs in life sciences research and translational advancements to the healthcare setting, have been achieved through studying the response of biological systems to extreme environments," Nickerson says, such as microgravity. Nickerson and Curtiss hope that results from the RASV spaceflight study will offer important clues for producing a more protective anti-pneumococcal immune response while limiting undesired side effects.

Although the space shuttle program is now ending, that doesn’t mean space-based research is over. The International Space Station remains in orbit, and access will be provided by other means in the future — both US ventures and those of other countries. Nickerson remains enthusiastic about spaceflight research: "It is incredibly exciting to me that we have the opportunity to use spaceflight as a unique research and development platform for novel applications with potential to help fight a globally devastating disease."

I’d love to hear about more such research and results, so please drop me a line!

—Cheryl Scott, senior technical editor