Nanomedicine on the ISS: Pioneering Medical and Pharmaceutical Research in Orbit

Absolutely.

And for me, too, I have a mother who has two, we call them robotic knees.

So this will be interesting information to pass along to her and also for myself as well.

Marianne, as you kindly said, you know, we're not going to get too technical, but we're going to hear some medical research terms during this webcast.

In the title of this, we're talking about nanomedicine, nanoparticles.

Can you just explain the basic principle of how nanomedicine works and why this is important in researching disease prevention and treatment for, as you said, osteoarthritis?

Sure.

And for the benefit of our viewers today, a picture is worth a thousand words.

So we brought a couple of slides for Escara so that we can talk to you a little bit about what we're up to and what we're doing.

So as I mentioned to you, Jeff, I don't want to get too technical, but we do want to emphasize to everybody here that Escara is actually a biotech company.

We're a nanomedicine company and we're an early stage startup.

And so we're just three and a half years old now.

And I think what's really important to note in all of this is that while we are working in a biotech environment, we had an opportunity to really think out of the box and think about ways that we can take an effective product that we're actually using on Earth and advance it even more quickly by leveraging space.

A lot of people are unaware of the real advantages of a microgravity environment.

This is really important because from a business perspective, finding a method to be able to take a therapeutic agent, some sort of a therapeutic cargo, whether it's RNA, whether it's a protein or peptide, and deliver it specifically to a therapeutic area is an emerging sector of medicine today.

And the reason why it's important for anybody who might have a disease friend or family member who's been impacted by a disease like cancer.

If we can actually target a tumor as opposed to having to deliver a cancer therapy via IV that is going to create a lot of side effects, then there are lots and lots of opportunities to be able to really kind of send a therapy and a new and a more advantageous way where not only can you think about your medicinal target site much more strategically, but you can do it in a way that will have much less systemic impacts to the people who are actually living with that particular problem, that medical problem.

And finding safe ways to be able to deliver things to a specific target is actually really, really difficult.

So finding something that's safe and effective, that's easy to produce is actually very, very difficult.

There's not one thing on the market right now that can do that.

And yet, There's a lot of big interest in nanoparticles, but the current nanoparticles that exist in the world have severe limitations and they're actually quite toxic for many indications.

And so we're hoping to change that because we've actually created something that is completely different and doesn't exist on the market today.

Now, we talked about nanoparticles.

Nanoparticles are very small.

We're actually talking about something that is molecular.