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 were 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 was to demonstrate the production of analogue proteins with their Astro pharmacy, in-orbit.
To succeed there were three main scientific objectives that the students have identified in their proposal. First, analogue proteins needed to be produced in-orbit via single cell-free protein synthesis (CFPS). Next, the team needed 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 intended 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 aimed to 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 worked with experts in the field with the aim of building their experiment just like an actual payload.
This opportunity was offered through a collaboration between ESA Academy, ESA Human Spaceflight and Robotic Exploration directorate and Space Applications Services.
Advancing through key milestones from selection in 2022, through the Preliminary Design Review, up to the submission of the Critical Design Review data package, the team made a valuable contribution to the frontier of space-based biomanufacturing research. In 2025, following delays in its implementation, it was jointly agreed between the ESA Academy and the University of Nottingham to terminate the participation of the VITA project in the ESA Academy Experiments programme, which encompasses and replaces multiple programmes, including the Orbit Your Thesis! programme.
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.