In the shade of a rocket preparing for launch, graduate student Alice Burchett carried a small box. In the box were a number of vials. In the vials, tiny balls of cells, no larger than the ball in a ballpoint pen, embedded in hydrogel or nutrient media.
Burchett and her lab mates in the Tumor Immune Microenvironment and Mechanics (TIME) Lab had pipetted the cells into the vials and sealed them, and then drove 17 hours in shifts to deliver them to Kennedy Space Center in Florida in time for a SpaceX launch.
They hoped that the cells, after a month in orbit aboard the International Space Station, would be the key to understanding, and curing, glioblastoma, an aggressive, incurable brain cancer.
“To do this type of research, we focus on glioblastoma. Because as engineers, we’re really interested in solving unsolvable problems, and it's an incurable cancer,” Datta said.
Engineering a solution to cancer's questions
Meenal Datta is the Jane Schoelch DeFlorio Collegiate Professor of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, an affiliated faculty member of the Harper Cancer Research Institute, and the director of the TIME Lab. She is a chemical and biomedical engineer by training who studies the physics of cancer. While cancer elicits images of hospitals and medical treatment, cancer also poses engineering challenges, Datta said.
“As a tumor is growing, it's creating these physical forces both inside of itself and outside on the surrounding tissue, which causes all sorts of abnormalities and issues,” she said. “For example, when it grows and creates these physical forces inside, it's actually squeezing its own vasculature, its own blood vessels, closed. So imagine if I injected chemotherapy into my arm, and I'm hoping it will circulate to a tumor in the brain. It's not going to get there if all those blood vessels are constricted shut. That's not a cancer genetics problem, that's a mechanical engineering problem.”
Engineering drives Datta's research, and so it makes sense that a laser focus on engineering brought her to Notre Dame. She was drawn to the impressive mechanical engineering cadre, but once here, she became intrigued by her colleagues in the aerospace side of the department. In a conversation with Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor for Energy Studies, where he mentioned his work studying bubbles on the International Space Station as a means of cancer detection, she began to consider how space might transform her research as well.
Growing organoids in space
To do her research, Datta uses the same models as many cancer researchers: cancer cells in a dish, miniature organs called organoids that function as 3D tumors, and preclinical models such as mice. The problem, she said, is that building these 3D cell masses involves time, and they're not always perfect replicas of what forms inside our bodies.
“There are certain biological phenomena that we rely on in order to be able to do disease research on Earth. So we need, for example, a clump of cancer cells outside of the body to behave the way that they do inside the body so that we can study them. We can learn more about them, and we can discover and test treatments against them,” Datta explained. “Let's say, for example, I want to create a little miniature 3D organoid, a small tumor—it could take weeks, it could take months.”
That's particularly problematic with glioblastoma, a highly aggressive, terminal brain cancer. On average, patients survive only 18 months after diagnosis. For those patients, there is no time to waste, Datta said.
Research has already shown that brain development, aging, and muscle degeneration were accelerated in space, so she wondered if she could also speed up the process of creating brain tumor organoids, and create ones that were more similar to those formed naturally in the brain.
The hypothesis, she explained, is that under microgravity, cells can form in 3D better than they can in a petri dish, where they may sink to the bottom. In essence, they act similarly to how they do when they're suspended in the brain.
In March 2024, Datta's lab partnered with Space Tango, a company that builds small incubators called CubeLabs that can be sent to space. The miniature labs are autonomous and don't need to be manipulated by an astronaut, Datta said. They just need time in microgravity.
After about 40 days, the experiment ended with a splash in the ocean. From there, it was retrieved by a military helicopter and flown back to Kennedy Space Center, where Burchett picked up the space organoids and brought them back to Notre Dame to be analyzed by a team of graduate students, undergraduates, and research staff who work in Datta's lab.
Slicing open and analyzing organoids that are half a millimeter in diameter is time-consuming work, Burchett laughed, but the early data are promising.
“That’s not a cancer genetics problem, that's a mechanical engineering problem.”
Meenal Datta
Datta said: “We do have evidence that they seem to have formed better in space than they did on Earth, which is what we were hoping for. So they're more uniform in their size and shape, which is really good for reproducibility. The challenge in modeling disease is getting it to actually look like real disease. They seem to be behaving more like a glioblastoma tumor than the same organoids that were grown for the same time on Earth, from the same batch of cells. Everything was the same except one group went to space, and one group stayed down here.”
In summary: The cells grew faster; the cells grew better than they do in a lab. What's more, Datta's lab sent up a cocktail of cancer and immune cells, so the team is also analyzing how the two interacted.
“We're also interested in my lab in trying to study this interplay between physics or mechanics and the immune system, which is often overlooked in the cancer field. It's a growing area of research,” Datta said.
“Glioblastoma tumors are roughly 50 percent immune cells and 50 percent cancer cells, and you would think, that's great, the immune system is going to fight against that cancer. But this cancer is so smart that it hijacks and reprograms those immune cells to help it grow instead of fighting against it,” she explained. “That conversion of immune cells to help the tumor appears to be happening faster in space, too, which is really great for modeling purposes. It means that if it's recapitulating what happens in the body faster, then we can start to intervene on it faster as well.”
Burchett explained further: “For some reason, the effect that space has on your innate immune system is actually really similar to what we see in glioblastoma.” Now, she said, they hope to understand why the immune system cannot combat the cancer, so they can harness that knowledge for better drug screening and precision medicine.
Datta's space flights are supported by the National Science Foundation, Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space at the International Space Station National Lab (pictured). (Photo courtesy of WikiMedia)
The future of cancer research in space
The news wasn't all good. Many of the cells died during the experiment. Datta hypothesized that the G-forces sustained during ascent and descent may have shaken things up. So she has ideas for how to improve things on her next attempt.
Datta's team is funded for three additional in-space experiments, tentatively planned for 2026. This time, she hopes to include patient glioblastoma cells to see if there are ways to test drug treatments quickly for patients for whom time is of the essence.
Burchett, who hopes to stay in academia after completing her doctorate, noted that although taking these experiments to space might seem extreme, it may also be essential if there ever is to be progress.
“Despite decades and decades of research and improvements in other cancer types, we still have no cure for glioblastoma. Still, patients don't typically make it past two years. So I think if we're going to make progress, we're going to have to sort of step outside of what's ordinary.”
Datta hopes her research will help people like Anna Billingsley, who was diagnosed with glioblastoma two years ago.
A terminal diagnosis
Anna Billingsley knows the feeling of a ticking clock. She was diagnosed with glioblastoma two years ago after a sudden headache brought her to the emergency room. While she has survived beyond the average 18 months and has responded well to a series of procedures, chemotherapy, and treatments, she acknowledged that the terminal diagnosis has been a challenge.
“Cancer I was prepared and ready to handle, but when they said it was terminal, I was like, this is a different look and feel for the whole thing,” Billingsley recalled. The disease, and the necessary treatments, are relentless, she said. “This doesn't stop. This is terminal.”
Still, she faces each day with persistence and humor, noting that her kids are keen to poke fun when the former teacher needs to relearn things like her ABCs and words that escape her. It's all very ordinary, but that's how she wants to spend her time.
“If I had an opportunity to do it all over again, I'd do what I do. I still want to go to soccer practice with my kids, go to games, do all the same,” she said. “I didn't feel like I needed to go to Disney or anything like that. I just want to spend time with my kids.”
Her husband, Charles Billingsley, noted that the hope derived from work like Datta's is critical, too.
Anna Billingsley and her husband, Charles.
“It's very much encouraging knowing Professor Datta is one of those who's pushing to find ways to treat glioblastoma and just one of those who are out there doing it,” he said. “The fact that we're just not living in this little bubble and trying to fight this thing on our own, it's very, very hopeful.”
Datta, who spent a decade training at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, said, “For me, as the academic, I hope I can do science better and faster up there so that I can actually benefit patients down here.”
“Notre Dame's number one mission is to be a force for good in the world. The College of Engineering adheres to that. We constantly discuss that amongst ourselves as faculty and with our students as well. And we want to benefit the health and well-being of society as best as we can,” Datta said. “We take this mission very seriously, and this type of work, trying to accelerate cures for cancer by using the space environment, falls directly in line with Notre Dame's greater mission.”
Produced by the Office of Public Affairs and Communications
Pushing the boundaries of cancer research by taking the fight to space (2 min watch)
