future of engineering

NASA debuts digital design lab in Houston

The new facility will be key to innovating across the Artemis missions. Photo courtesy of NASA and UTEP

NASA has opened a new center in Houston that's dedicated to digital space innovation for the future of spaceflight.

The Digital Engineering Design Center has recently opened in NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston. The facility is equipping the aerospace engineering community with skills and processes for digital designing that can build, test, and refine innovations before the manufacturing and assembling process in order to to test them.

“The DEDC will help prepare a modern American aerospace workforce by equipping it with valuable skills in digital engineering and encourage even more students to become engineers,” says Julie Kramer White, director of engineering at NASA Johnson, in a news release. “Collaborations like this one show we are committed to having the most talented, diverse, and motivated engineers that can continue to meet the exploration goals of the agency.”

Julie Kramer White, engineering director at NASA Johnson, delivered a speech at the DEDC ribbon cutting ceremony at NASA Johnson. Photo courtesy of James Blair/NASA

Digital engineering has many benefits to NASA, including reduced risk and cost, streamlined development schedule, and the ability to work with experts remotely.

NASA’s DEDC program is operated by the University of Texas at El Paso Aerospace Center. The partnership, which was celebrated at JSC and UTEP simultaneously, is also a part of a collaboration with Johnson’s Engineering Directorate and the Space Technology Mission Directorate.

The 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.

ISRU is a key focus of the Artemis missions to the Moon and Mars. The engineers from NASA will be the ISRU experts, while UTEP professors will contribute their digital engineering software expertise.

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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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