Auxilium Biotechnologies has bioprinted kidney and liver tissue aboard the International Space Station. It says that is the first time anyone has made either in space. The samples flew home last month on a SpaceX cargo capsule, and the company announced the results on Thursday.
It was not a one-off. In the same mission, Auxilium’s AMP-1 orbital printer also made cartilage tissue and 28 nerve-repair implants. That, the firm says, is the first time a single spaceflight has produced three tissue types, and a first for a multi-product manufacturing platform in orbit.
Why print in space at all
The answer is gravity, or the lack of it. On Earth, soft living tissue tends to slump before it sets, so printers lean on scaffolds and thickeners to hold a shape. In microgravity, the tissue can keep its form while the cells settle evenly. Wake Forest’s Dr Anthony Atala, whose institute supplied the cells and designs, said the “uniform cell distribution” in orbit points to real promise.
It helps to be clear about what this is not. These are small tissue samples, not organs ready for transplant. A printed kidney you could put in a patient remains years away. The hard problem of threading blood vessels through thick tissue still blocks the path.
The real near-term use
The nearer payoff is research. The same method can make organoids, tiny lab-grown tissue models that mimic a real organ. Drug companies use them to test whether a compound works or turns toxic, without a human or an animal.
That lands at a useful moment. US regulators are pushing to cut animal testing, and the FDA has named organoids among the alternatives it wants. Today, labs make those models on Earth and ship them up. Making them in orbit, on demand, could cut the wait.
A bet on the post-ISS era
There is a business logic under the science. The ISS is due to retire around 2031, and a wave of commercial space stations is lining up to replace it. Auxilium is positioning its printers for that shift. It names station builders Vast and Starlab as partners, and talks of manufacturing on the Moon later.
The work builds on an earlier Auxilium mission that printed nerve-repair devices on the station. For now, orbital bioprinting is a research tool, not a factory. But the pitch is that growing human tissue, a messy and delicate job, may be one thing that is simply easier off the planet.
