eavesdropping in houston

Overheard: Houston needs to strengthen infrastructure, workforce to maintain Space City status

Space experts discussed the city's role in the space industry at a recent event. Photo via NASA

In no time at all, humans will return to the moon and as they make the first spacewalks in fifty years — wearing suits designed in Houston — they will call down to earth, and only one city in the world will be named on the radio transmissions.

Houston is the Space City — but what will it take to maintain that moniker? This was a big topic of the Greater Houston Partnership's second annual State of Space event hosted on Tuesday, October 11.

A diverse and impressive panel discussed the Space City's future, the upcoming moon missions, commercializations, and more. If you missed the discussion, check out some key moments from the event.

"Houston has a significant role in all areas of Artemis."

— Vanessa Wyche, director of NASA's Johnson Space Center. "We have crew missions, robotic missions, and other technologies that will make up Artemis."

"The big mission we have is for Houston to remain the hub in human space flight moving forward."

— Wyche says, adding "for us to be the nexus and accelerator of research, innovation, and STEM, we need to work together for workforce development for the space economy."

"We're at a point were we can pivot to develop scalable products at a much lower cost — it really reduces the barrier of entry for commercial space partners."

— Peggy Guirgis, general manager of space systems for Collins Aerospace. "We're building in Houston because this is really an engineering hub," she adds, noting the industries and schools here that support the industry.

"Why Houston? Because of, more than anything, the sense of community."

— Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines, noting the support behind building the Houston Spaceport and the existing Johnson Space Center, as well as all the other players within the space sector locally.

"At some point in the very near future we are going to land humans on the moon — the first woman on the moon, the first person of color on the moon — and we're going to say, 'Moon, Houston.' This is the only city in the world that's going to be said on those loops."

— Kate Rubins, NASA astronaut. "I feel very fortunate to be here."

"Right here in Houston — at the HoustonSpaceport, we're building a space where the Space Force can do classified work."

— Altemus says. "That's one area that I'd like to see grow."

"We need to continue to build a talent pipeline as well as generating a workforce that is able to keep pace with the rapidly growing space industry."

— Guirgis says.

"When people think about Houston, NASA has been the nexus and center of gravity, but all of Houston has been a magnet. It's a draw to come and work here."

— Rubins says. "One way to continue this is through infrastructure that's being built here — it's incredible. It's going to cement this as a place that you want to come if you're a commercial company and you want to partner with NASA, or you want to be a contractor for one of these other companies. ... And the startup scene is booming these days in Houston."

"We need to make sure that we have the world-class capabilities."

— Wyche says. "The workforce is so very important."

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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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