A shoebox-sized automated biotech laboratory built at the University of Canterbury is being prepared for a series of test flights aboard Dawn Aerospace’s reusable spaceplane, a step that will put New Zealand scientists at the front of a global push to grow better drug-development protein crystals in microgravity.
The platform is led by Associate Professor Sarah Kessans of the University of Canterbury Faculty of Engineering, who has spent more than a decade working on ways to use space to do biology that simply cannot be done on the ground. Her team has just been awarded $600,000 from the government’s Kiwi Space Activator programme, announced by Space Minister Chris Penk on 16 May, and that money will fund the next phase of work with Dawn Aerospace ahead of a planned return to the International Space Station.
“We’ve essentially shrunk an entire crystallisation lab into a shoebox-sized platform,” Kessans told RNZ. “That means we can do far more testing than has traditionally been possible in orbit.”
Protein crystallography is the engine that drives much of modern drug design. To make a new medicine, chemists need to know the exact three-dimensional shape of the protein they are trying to bind to, and the cleanest way to get that picture is to grow a perfect crystal of the protein and shine X-rays through it. On Earth, gravity drags the crystals around as they form, which warps the lattice and blurs the image. In orbit, where free fall cancels out that pull, the crystals form into far cleaner geometric shapes.
“In microgravity, you get much bigger, much higher quality, more perfect protein crystals,” Kessans said. The cleaner the crystal, the sharper the X-ray picture, and the easier it is for pharmaceutical researchers to design molecules that fit exactly into the active sites of disease-related proteins.
The Canterbury team’s idea is to take that work out of the hands of astronauts and run it on a fully automated rig, screening thousands of crystallisation conditions in a single mission. A prototype version of the platform flew to the International Space Station in 2024, supported by close to $10 million from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment Endeavour Fund, and brought back enough useful data to justify a follow-up.
That follow-up is where Dawn Aerospace comes in. The Christchurch and Delft company has spent several years building a reusable unmanned spaceplane that takes off from a conventional runway, climbs above 100 kilometres into space and glides back to land on the same runway, all in a single short flight. Each flight gives experiments a few minutes of microgravity, which is plenty of time for a self-contained crystallisation run. The plan is to fly components of the Canterbury rig aboard Dawn’s aircraft, refine the hardware between flights, and then take a proven design back to the Space Station for a longer mission.
“We will be the first mission of its kind, conducting multiple spaceplane microgravity flights,” Kessans told Scoop. The flights are expected to operate out of the Tāwhaki National Aerospace Centre at Kaitorete Spit, the runway and research site jointly owned by Ngāi Tahu and the Crown about 50 kilometres south of Christchurch.
Kessans is something of an unusual export-import case for New Zealand science. She grew up in the United States, studied plant biology at Purdue and finished a PhD at Arizona State University, where she helped develop a plant-based candidate vaccine for HIV. She moved to Canterbury, threw herself into the country’s growing aerospace sector and now leads a team that pulls in researchers from the University of Auckland and a string of small New Zealand engineering and software firms, including Intranel and Asteria Engineering.
The broader prize is commercial. International pharmaceutical companies already pay to fly experiments to the Space Station because the results are good enough to feed directly into new drug formulations. Merck used microgravity work to reformulate its anti-cancer drug Keytruda from an intravenous infusion that has to be delivered in a clinic to a version that can be injected at home. If the Canterbury platform performs as advertised, New Zealand could position itself as a low-cost, high-throughput supplier of that kind of orbital crystallography service to the global drug industry.
The current phase, paid for by the Kiwi Space Activator grant, will run through integration testing with Dawn Aerospace and finalise the engineering of the spaceplane payload. Kessans said her team had already started selecting the proteins they want to fly first, with an eye on molecules linked to cancer, infectious disease and metabolic disorders. The longer-term ambition is a routine commercial service in which a Christchurch-built lab loaded with someone else’s protein goes up the runway, climbs into space, lands, and is back in a freezer within the hour.
“I’m an absolute science geek, so I’m really excited to see what the possibilities are,” she said.
For a country that talks a lot about a high-value, science-led economy, a New Zealand laboratory the size of a shoebox flying its own design of drug research up to orbit and back from a runway in Canterbury is exactly the kind of story that makes the case. If it works, the next generation of cancer and infectious disease medicines may well have a small piece of their origin story written south of Christchurch.
What do you think about New Zealand’s growing role in space biotechnology? Should the government be putting more money behind work like this, or is it the kind of project the private sector should fund on its own? Leave a comment below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
Leave a Reply