(NewsNation) — President Joe Biden’s “cancer moonshot” hasn’t literally put cancer research on the moon. But research conducted on the International Space Station has yielded a major development: a cancer “kill switch.”
That research, conducted by the University of California San Diego, produced what the lead researcher calls a “game changer:” A drug that might block cancer cells’ ability to clone themselves.
“Not only can we detect when cancer starts to clone itself, we found a kill switch,” Sanford Stem Cell Institute Director Dr. Catriona Jamieson told “NewsNation Now.”
Cancer cells grow about three times faster in the microgravity of earth orbit than they do on earth. That lets scientists observe the progression of cancer growth — and how well cancer treatments work — more quickly.
The Sanford team has sent research cargo to the ISS a number of times. One mission included miniature tumors treated with two types of medication designed to block ADAR1, a cloning gene that works faster under the stress of microgravity.
Armed with that data, Jamieson’s team put its latest payload on January’s Axiom 3 spaceflight: breast cancer tumors treated with another new formula. The first results show that it inhibits cancer growth more effectively than the drugs tested before.
“These missions that we’ve done to the international space station… have been really eye opening,” says Jamieson. Her team hopes to begin clinical trails on blood, breast and colorectal cancer patients by the end of this year.
Last year, researchers at the University of California Davis identified what they also labeled a cancer “kill switch:” targeted, specific killing of cancer cells while not harming healthy cells.
