After a couple years of discussion, NIH and NASA are teaming up to send your biomedical experiments into space.

The two agencies are accepting proposals for a two-phased 5-year grants that would first give investigators $150,000 to make their lab experiments feasible in space, and then provide a follow-on $300,000 for the "flight phase." Nine NIH institutes will be participating in the grant.

Experiments in space have already studied bone and muscle deterioration in micro-gravity, as well as topics related to infectious disease and cancer, according to an NIH press release. Last year, the space shuttle Discovery carried on board an experiment meant to explore the production of a Salmonella vaccine in space.

Doing science in space can be a bit of a tricky operation. Astronauts without laboratory training have to be able to execute all aspects of the experiment with ease. If your experiments require too much technical expertise, you might be out of luck. The first space biotech company, Astrotech Corporation (formerly SPACEHAB), for example, used containers with a handle that astronauts simply had to crank. One turn of the handle combined one compartment containing C. elegans to another containing an infectious agent. Another turn released a fixative into the solution -- halting the disease reaction for analysis back home.

To help scientists figure out how to make their experiments space-worthy, the NIH and NASA are holding a pre-application meeting in Houston, Texas, on June 16th, ahead of the application due date on September 30th. The meeting, which can be accessed by teleconference, will give researchers a primer on International Space Station equipment and introduce them to hardware developers that would help design appropriate experimental chambers.

Applicants will get the yea or nay from the agency after May 2010 and the first experiments will take flight in 2011.

Editor's Note (9th April 2009): This story has been updated from a previous version.


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Biotech in space?
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