The Orbital Industrial Revolution: The Business Reasons for Industrializing Space Pt 2

Today’s post will be on the pharmaceutical industry. Having its origins in the late nineteenth century, the pharmaceutical industry has been around for more than 100 years. Over that period, as our understanding of biology and chemistry grew, the pharmaceutical industry began to create newer, better drugs. Still, despite the new science, and new technology, drug research is still done the same way now as it was during the early twentieth century, through painstaking trial and error. This methodology was fine until diseases began to evolve, and the drug industry began trying to cure more difficult diseases. Now, it takes nearly ten years and two billion dollars to create a drug. Added to that, with imminent health care legislation forcing head to head drug tests, companies face more competition than ever. This all leads to squeezed margins, and diminishing profits. Fortunately the technology to reduce the costs exists. It was used to detect and map DNA can be used to get chemical structures of complex organic molecules to better understand the reactions it will have with a host minus the long trial and error process. Unfortunately, this technology requires near perfect crystals to be grown. In a gravity environment, this is impossible due to natural convection.

Fortunately, this can be done cheaply and quickly in a microgravity environment. In a zero gravity environment, crystals of large organic molecules grow perfectly, giving perfect samples for X ray crystallography. Also, living organisms grow three times faster than on Earth due to the lower gravity, allowing tests to be done three times faster than possible on Earth. These two advantages can be used to save months and possibly years off research timelines saving millions of dollars.