Meet the team: VITA
The need for on-demand pharmaceuticals will increase as humanity ventures further away from planet Earth. A spaceship is not able to turn around on the spot nor can it hold supplies for every scenario. A solution was proposed by a team of students that want to test the viability of and reliability of analogue pharmaceutical proteins. With this proposal they were selected for the third iteration of the Orbit Your Thesis! programme.
Team VITA is currently led by five PhD students, and four master Students from Nottingham University in the UK. A true multidisciplinary team covering a background in Pharmacy, biology, immunology, engineering, and IT. The name of the team (VITA) stands for Visualizing In-space TXTL Astro pharmaceuticals. Their goal is to demonstrate the production of analogue proteins with their Astro pharmacy, in-orbit.
To succeed there are three main scientific objectives that the students have identified in their proposal. First, analogue proteins need to be produced in-orbit via single cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS). Next, the team needs to prove that freeze-drying CFPS components on cellulose is a viable means of preserving the ability to produce their analogue proteins in-orbit. Lastly, the students intend to test a novel purification strategy by assessing the binding of nanobody and target protein in-orbit, upon return of samples to Earth.
The team will set out to build their Astro pharmacy in accordance with the requirements set by Space Application Services for the ICE Cubes Facility. The ICE Cubes Facility can be found in the European Physiology Module (EPM) in the Columbus module of the International Space Station (ISS). The team will work with experts in the field to build their experiment just like an actual payload.
If this spiked your interest in the hands-on programmes offered by ESA Academy or if you have an experiment you would like to perform in altered gravity environments, then click here to learn more about the possibilities of performing your investigations at one of the platforms available for student experiments at ESA Academy.