NASA Device Inducted Into Space Technology Hall Of Fame
HOUSTON -- A rotating device developed by NASA inventors to growbetter living tissue specimens was inducted into the Space Technology
Hall of Fame Thursday, April 14. The Space Foundation honored the
NASA team who created the device, which promises help for several
diseases, during a ceremony at the 27th National Space Symposium in
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Developed in 1986 by a group of NASA engineers and researchers at the
agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the device, known as the
bioreactor, enables the growth of tissue, cancer tumors and virus
cultures outside the body in space and on Earth. It has many
advantages over typical laboratory methods.
Lab-grown cell cultures tend to be small, flat and two-dimensional,
unlike normal tissues in the body. However, tissues grown in the
bioreactor are larger and three-dimensional, with structural and
chemical characteristics similar to normal tissue. The bioreactor has
no internal moving parts, which minimizes forces that might damage
the delicate cell cultures.
Three of the co-developers of the bioreactor also are being inducted
in the Space Technology Hall of Fame: Dr. David Wolf, NASA astronaut,
physician and electrical engineer; Tinh Trinh, senior mechanical
engineer, Wyle Integrated Science and Engineering Group; and Ray
Schwarz, chief engineer and co-founder of Synthecon Inc.
The bioreactor has been used for experiments aboard the space shuttle,
the Russian Mir space station and on Earth. Researchers across the
United States use this technology to study cancer, stem cells,
diabetes, cartilage and nerve growth, and infectious disease.
Researchers at the National Institutes of Health used the methods to
propagate the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV, in artificial
lymph node tissue. This research resulted in the ability to study the
virus life cycle under controlled conditions outside of the human body.
The bioreactor is a spinoff technology that entered the commercial
world when Synthecon licensed it in 1993. Regenetech Inc. licensed 11
patents from Johnson in 2001 to produce three-dimensional tissues in
the bioreactor. Regenetech, through a special NASA agreement,
provides the technology to researchers pursuing rare disease
treatments. In December, 2010, Emerging Healthcare Solutions Inc.
acquired a sublicense from Regenetech to use the bioreactor. The
bioreactor is manufactured for commercial sale by Synthecon.
A closed tubular cylinder forms the bioreactor's cell culture chamber,
which is filled with a liquid medium in which cells grow. The chamber
rotates around a horizontal axis, allowing the cells to develop in an
environment similar to the free fall of microgravity. Oxygen,
required by cells for growth, is fed into the liquid medium through a
porous wall in the chamber. The importance of this cell culture
technique is that fluid mechanical conditions obtained in
microgravity, and emulated on Earth, allow the growth of tissues in
the laboratory that cannot be grown any other way.
The 2011 Space Technology Hall of Fame organizational inductees are
those that developed the technology and refined it for commercial
use: NASA's Johnson Space Center, Regenetech Inc. and Synthecon Inc.
All three are based in Houston.
For more information about the Space Technology Hall of Fame inducted
technologies, organizations and individuals, visit:
http://www.
For more information about NASA and agency programs, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov
Source: NASA
