Cancer cells die in microgravity conditions – study

I did my PhD in cell biology a few years ago and I am seriously sceptical about the Kickstarter campaign. There are too many questions and way too few control experiments. What you can see about their preliminary research is the rotation device and the pictures of the cells. From what I have learned during my studies is that it is easy to kill cell cultures and it is difficult to compare different cell lines. For example, most cells need a very controlled environment (temperature, growth medium, pH, a specific amount of cells per area and not too many or too few neighbouring cells etc.) This rotation device appears to be at room temperature and creates a shear flow, which is enough to kill most cell cultures. The picture they show is not helpful at all, as they just show dying cells. As others stated: you need more control experiments. One would be to keekp a bottle of cells in the machine, without rotation. That's really cheap and easy to compare, which they did not. (not addressing the issue that that's not real microgravity) I hope to find time later to find their publications, until then I don't believe this to be real.

Edit: I cannot find anything that's even looking like research. News articles all referring Chou, but nothing to show for it. No paper or data. Now it looks even worse.

So human cells first survive 3 gs during launch then zero gs before they come back to good old g again. They live and multiply through all this, as long as they stay inside the human.

Now somebody created a carousel and says extracted human cells die when put on that carousel. Some pertinent questions were not addressed in the article: Would the extracted cells live if not put on the carousel? Do other types of extracted cells not die when put on it?

Instead of answering these simple question, they speculate about sending cell cultures to space. Where it's even harder to control conditions. I expect exactly nothing to come of it.

Edit: They have not tested in "microgravity". There is no single place on earth where you can sustain microgravity. You'd have to move very very fast. At which point you have other problems. What they do to cell cultures is move them up and down while rotating them. This simulates microgravity in the sense that "on average" the cell cultures experience zero-g in any one direction. Actually the cultures are routinely accelerated above one g with added torque!

I'm skeptical that this could really work, but imagine the breakthroughs that would be ushered in for both medicine and space travel if it turned out that zero gravity diminished cancer? It would be the best incentive by far humans have ever had to develop space travel. And curing cancer at the same time! Billions of dollars of research funds could be redirected for developing rockets and we'd saving more lives than before! A wonderful narrative to a science fiction eutopia at least :)

So, just like Contact (the movie), where Hadden lives his last days in space to slow down his cancer.

Oh boy

"Chou Collective Join our journey to help us find a cure to cancer and other aging diseases by utilising the unique environment of space."

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/choucollective/curing-d...

It's a shame that it is practically impossible to culture healthy cells the way they probably cultured these cancer cells so there is not really a control experiment.

But we know people (bags of healthy cell in their normal environment) don't die in space and cancer cells (presumably they did the same experiment on earth) keep growing in normal gravity. So what we can say is that the combination of loosing their normal environment and gravity kills these cancer cells (if they used cell lines those cells are hardly comparable to normal cancer cells anymore by the way). It's interesting to find out why, but it's a long way from saying that this finding will help cure cancer.

Stem cells are also affected.

Stem Cell Health and Tissue Regeneration in Microgravity https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4235978/

It seems that after few days in days in microgravity, human immune cells were unable to differentiate into mature cells.

> Over the long-term, exposure to microgravity may cause severe deficits in mammalian stem cell-based tissue regenerative health, including, osteogenesis, hematopoiesis, and lymphopoeisis

>The lack of gravity in space is a major concern for stem cell and tissue regenerative health during long-term spaceflight.

> "But what I really wanted to know was: is there something these cancers have in common? That's why I put them in the microgravity device."

What is this microgravity device? A quick web search was inconclusive.

Before anyone answers this, I would like to guess. Is it either real levitation by (dia)magnetic levitation (when levitating a live frog was possible years ago, levitating a tiny amount of cells in a desktop device should be possible by now?) or maybe something that makes the effect of gravity average out, e.g. floating clusters of cells in a fluid to reduce the net force and maybe even rotate them (or let them rotate freely), so that there is no longer a preferred direction in the cluster (which is what I guess is what is important here)?

>We want to see if it is actually microgravity that’s having an affect on the cell, or could it be other things in space — like solar radiation?" he said. But such an endeavor is no easy task, Chou points out.

Wow. What a headline.

> Cancer cells die in [whatever] conditions.

So what? There are plenty of [whatever]s that satisfy this statement.

The difficult part is how to create such conditions within the human body without affecting sane cells!

What is the control? Do cancer cells normally live if they are taken out of the body?

Nose cancer!!!? There's nose cancer?

This just shows again how much we need a permanent lab in microgravity.

> "We want to see if it is actually microgravity that’s having an affect on the cell, or could it be other things in space — like solar radiation?" he said. But such an endeavor is no easy task, Chou points out.

Why would he say that after the on-planet microgravity experiment? There was no solar radiation in his actual experiment where the cells died so why would he entertain that? Someone else should entertain that totally different experiment while he tries to gain support for expanding his experiment.

Cannabinoids would probably be easier for people.