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Morning Brew is a free daily newsletter Monday through Sunday that gets you up to speed on business news in just 5 minutes. Click the link in the description to subscribe now. [ ♪ intro ♪] We’ve known for quite some time that space travel can do a number on human health.

In addition to the common injuries and illnesses that people always face, space exploration adds new risks, from radiation exposure to bone density changes. Plus the immune system can struggle to do its job under the challenging conditions of microgravity, while some viruses get even stronger. No thank you, space shingles.

Getting to the nearest hospital from orbit is no easy feat, either. And, on a future mission to Mars, it might be downright impossible. So, as our species prepares for longer, farther journeys into space , we need to up our space medicine game, as well.

The good news is that medical science has already made amazing advances in diagnosing and treating conditions that pop up in space. Even so, the options for medical equipment are still quite limited, due to storage issues and the high cost to get them into space in the first place. Instead, the focus is on preventing and controlling any hazardous situations.

That way, doctors can catch health issues early, before someone gets to the point of being unstable or critically ill. Because if it got to that point, that could make a trip home impossible, even in low orbit. Knowing an astronaut’s white blood cell count could help determine how severe their illness or infection is, and track how they’re responding to treatments during long-haul missions.

The trouble is, getting that count requires drawing and analyzing a patient’s blood. Historically, that simply hasn’t been possible in space. In part, we can blame microgravity, since it changes how fluids behave.

Traditional analysis techniques don’t work in space because they were designed to count and identify cells in a way that requires blood samples to flow as you would expect under normal gravity conditions. On top of that, analysis equipment is too bulky to be easily taken on a spacecraft. Astronauts today draw their blood and freeze it until they return to Earth.

That’s helpful for long-term research, but useless for an in-the-moment diagnosis. But all that may be about to change, thanks to an innovative blood analysis technology called HemoCue. HemoCue is the first machine to successfully analyze white blood cells in space, using only the tiny prick of a finger.

It requires less than a milliliter of blood for the test, which saves a lot of time and effort compared to dealing with tubes full of blood. Better still, the approach doesn’t require any added liquid substances ike those typically used for terrestrial blood analysis. Plus, the device is small, about the size of a toaster.

And the small sample size gets around a lot of the hassles that microgravity creates for more traditional techniques. That’s a significant contrast from most blood analysis machines, which require large quantities of added compounds and generate a lot more biohazardous waste from larger blood samples. The HemoCue technology was tested on the International Space Station in 2021 with promising results, opening the door to identifying and monitoring a variety of health conditions on future spaceflights.

Diagnosis isn’t the only medical realm scientists are trying to improve on in space. Say an astronaut does end up discovering a health problem through a blood test. They’ll probably want to treat it as soon as possible so it doesn’t become a bigger issue.

For many ailments, that treatment comes in the form of medication. The ISS stocks nearly 200 different medicines on board. Which, yes, is a lot.

But it’s not an exhaustive list, and there can be only so many of any given pill. In 2017, NASA tracked the drug consumption of six space station crew members. On average, each used four different medications per week.

That amounted to around 450 medication uses per crew member over their five to six month-long missions. The longer the mission, the larger the pharmacy you’d need on hand. Just the volume of medication needed for a years-long mission to Mars would present serious storage challenges.

So to plan around this, NASA is funding research focused on the manufacture of medicine in space! One possibility is to genetically modify a plant like lettuce to turn it into a drug factory. In 2020, researchers at the University of California began developing a lettuce that produces a drug used to treat osteoporosis.

Now this work is in the early stages, and, even if medicinal lettuce successfully produces the desired drugs consistently, there’s the problem of how to get it into the astronauts. The researchers are still unsure how the drug might be extracted from the lettuce, And, if that isn’t sci-fi enough for you, one of the more wild ideas is to implant each astronaut with their own little tiny drug factory. A special device that’s inserted inside the stomach, known as a gastric resident system, is already being developed to help manage the daily doses required for tuberculosis infections here on Earth.

This device could be taken one step further for use in space, not only releasing, but creating necessary medicines right inside the guts of those who need them. The core of the system would be a bacterium like E. coli, which is already used to produce drugs in other contexts. The embedded bacteria could produce and then slowly release melatonin, acetaminophen, or even caffeine.

While overcoming some of these challenges like dealing with microgravity are unique to spaceflight, others might have more earthly applications. Sure, outer space might be about the hardest place to make a delivery, but getting medicines to remote communities in far-flung areas isn’t a picnic either. With luck, breakthroughs made to enable the exploration of the solar system will translate to increased access and better equity here on Earth.

And, if, one day, taking a lifesaving drug involves nothing more than snacking on a tasty salad— sign me up! Maybe you start your day with meds or vitamin pills to stay healthy. Or maybe you spend it catching up on the news.

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