ready for takeoff

Houston space tech company secures fourth NASA mission

Axiom Space secured another mission with NASA and SpaceX. Photo courtesy of SpaceX

Houston's Axiom Space announced this month that it has signed its fourth mission order with NASA to send a private astronaut mission to the International Space Station.

The mission is targeted to launch no earlier than August 2024 from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3) is targeted to launch no earlier than January of the same year.

Ax-1 successfully launched in April 2022, and Ax-2 successfully launched about a year later, in May 2023. Ax-2 was the first private mission commanded by a woman and included the first Saudi astronauts to live and work on the ISS, and the first Saudi female astronaut to go to space.

"Each mission allows us to build on the foundation we have set for the world's first commercial space station, Axiom Station, preparing our teams and orbital platform to succeed ISS operations in low-Earth orbit," says Michael Suffredini, CEO and president of Axiom Space, in a press release. "These missions are instrumental in expanding commercial space activities and access to space for individuals and nations around the world, as well as developing the knowledge and experience needed to normalize living and working in microgravity.”

Axiom Mission 4 (Ax-4) is expected to spend up to 14 days docked to the ISS.

The crew will train for their flight with NASA, international partners, and SpaceX. SpaceX has also been contracted as launch provider for the missions.

Last month, Axiom also received $5 million to continue its work developing new spacesuits that will be used in NASA's upcoming Artemis missions, with a potential value of $142 million investment over four years. The company has been working on the spacesuits with North Carolina-based Collins Aerospace since last summer.

Initial designs of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or AxEMU, were revealed in March at Space Center Houston’s Moon 2 Mars Festival.

Earlier this summer, NASA also opened its Digital Engineering Design Center in Johnson Space Center. Enrolled engineers and students will work on NASA projects related to in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, which is a type of engineering that utilizes materials native to space

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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