Maintaining crew health is the primary objective in developing life support systems for space exploration. The pharmaceutical supply chain for a Mars mission is severely constrained by accelerated radiation-induced degradation and long transit time from Earth to Mars. Any emergency medical countermeasures to unanticipated health threats are also severely limited with an Earth-reliant supply chain. For these reasons, in situ production of small molecule drugs and biologics under the available resources of a Martian environment will be key in securing stable long-term crew member health. Plants have been long recognized as being essential for space exploration life support – capable of harnessing light, producing food, generating oxygen, purifying water, and buoying crew member mental health. However, this potential has expanded in recent decades to include pharmacological life support as the expression of recombinant proteins in planta has been established as a rapid and versatile way to produce complex protein-based biopharmaceuticals. A variety of drug delivery routes are envisioned, ranging from oral delivery to injectable, each with their own technical challenges to overcome in the resource-constrained Martian environment. We are developing plant-based platform technologies for the production and purification of biopharmaceuticals which can be implemented in a Mars-like environment. Our first example is a bone regeneration therapeutic, human parathyroid hormone (PTH) fused with the Fc domain of human IgG1 (PTH-Fc), produced in lettuce. Using transient expression methods, PTH-Fc levels reach ~10 mg/kg fresh weight at six days post-infiltration and stable transgenic lines are currently being generated. The plant-made PTH-Fc fusion protein is intact and binds to the target receptor (PTH1R) with the same affinity as the human PTH. We are also developing plant based virus- immunosorbent nanoparticles (VINs) which can be used as renewable, regenerable affinity ligands for chromatographic separations in case a highly purified injectable drug in needed.

Making biopharmaceuticals on Mars

2019 Spring National Meeting

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