This 20-Employee Kendall Square Biotech Just Secured a Seat on Elon Musk's Upcoming Space Rocket

This 20-Employee Kendall Square Biotech Just Secured a Seat on Elon Musk's Upcoming Space Rocket February 9, 2017
By Alex Keown, BioSpace.com Breaking News Staff

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – When Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket blasts off on Valentine’s Day, the ship will be carrying more than love, it will also carry a deadly bacteria—the MRSA bacteria.

The bacteria will be part of an experiment conducted by the Kendall Square diagnostics company Nanobiosym to test the effects of near zero gravity on the “superbug,” the Boston Business Journal reported Wednesday. Anita Goel, the founder and chief executive officer of Nanobiosym, told the Journal the experiment is being conducted to examine the effects of zero gravity on the bacteria’s mutation abilities. MRSA is highly resistant to antibiotics due to its ability to rapidly mutate. Goel said a microgravity environment could cause the mutations to speed up, which could give researchers a chance to see how MRSA evolves and will allow scientists to anticipate the mutations in designing antibiotics. The experiment is being funded through a grant from the Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, the Journal reported.

In 2015, Goel won the top prize in the Galactic Grant Competition to fund the Nanobiosym Research Institute to push the frontier of nanobiophysics and the Gene-RADAR technology on the International Space Station. Nanobiosym’s Gene-RADAR is a mobile tricorder-like device that enables gold standard real-time diagnosis of any disease with a genetic fingerprint, according to the company data.

“Our work in microgravity on International Space Station is both very practical and fundamental. We are pushing the envelope of personalized, precision medicine, enabling better prediction of drug resistance and hence smarter drugs. On a fundamental science level, I am keen to test my 20 year old hypothesis that the environment can deeply influence the information flow from both the genome and transcriptome,” Goel said, according to Forbes.

MRSA, methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, is caused by a type of staph bacteria that is difficult to kill off. It is not uncommon for the bacteria to be spread through health care facilities like hospitals and nursing homes. Patients who have recently undergone invasive procedures or device implants are most susceptible to succumbing to infections caused by the bacteria.

Nanobiosym’s experiment is not the only one that will be conducted in space next week. Another experiment will test muscle contractions in the microgravity environment. Goel told the Journal that space science is “a great melting pot.” “There are all kinds of fields and projects coming together that are taking advantage of working on the space station and pushing the frontier of human knowledge.”

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