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Welcome to In-Orbit, the fortnightly podcast exploring how technology from space is empowering a better world.
[00:00:04] Dallas Campbell: Welcome to Outer Orbit. This is the bit where we take one of our guests and maybe pick up on something interesting that came up that we didn't really have time to, examine fully in the main bit of the show, and I'm here with Martin Braddock from GENIXICONSULTING.
Just for our listeners, just in case they haven't heard the main episode, just tell us what you do.
[00:00:29] Dr Martin Braddock: Okay, so I'm founder of GENIXICONSULTING. I had a career in the biopharm industry for nearly 30 years.
[00:00:36] Dallas Campbell: Crikey.
[00:00:37] Dr Martin Braddock: And prior to that, an academic career, university of Oxford, University of Dundee. So I've been around science...
[00:00:43] Dallas Campbell: around the block.
[00:00:44] Dr Martin Braddock: quite a while. Drug discovery and drug development and commercialization of drug products.
[00:00:50] Dallas Campbell: So interesting.
We were talking a lot about the developments of drugs in space and the benefits of the absence of gravitational effects and designing drugs, et cetera, et cetera.
One thing just at the end of our conversation, which is why I wanted to keep you, we started to go a little bit more esoteric, I think, and we started to talk about this idea of human longevity in space and This sounds very sci-fi 'cause of course one of the great sci-fi tropes was that the astronauts on their, have spent thousands of years in space and they. In Alien, famously, the kind of pods open up and they kind of awake from their hibernation state years having passed as a way of circumnavigating the short lifecycle span of humans. Is this total sci-fi, but you were hinting that maybe that's something there?
[00:01:34] Dr Martin Braddock: I don't think it is total sci-fi. I mean, it is total sci-fi at present for human beings.
Then if we think about, well, what precedents are there within the animal kingdom? And, for anybody who's ever had a tortoise as a pet, well, you, you know, they hibernate.
[00:01:49] Dallas Campbell: For people of a certain age.
[00:01:50] Dr Martin Braddock: and there are plenty of other examples of where animals hibernate they are to an extent in stasis.
[00:01:57] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.
[00:01:58] Dr Martin Braddock: They metabolize very little, of course they don't eat, they don't do the, things that the opposite end of the elementary canal either. So there, there is a precedent for, hibernation and stasis. But I think in fairness, we don't really understand it and we don't understand why we can't, in theory at least, do it in humans as of yet.
[00:02:19] Dallas Campbell: When you say we don't understand, have we not, someone must have done their PhD study on why bears hibernate or why tortoise is hibernate. We must kind of understand it?
[00:02:28] Dr Martin Braddock: We understand why it happens in the animal kingdom, but I don't think we understand why it doesn't happen in the human species and why perhaps it couldn't be induced to happen in humans.
The part of what we do understand is how to put somebody in, if you like, an induced coma, of course, after traumatic injury. Which is sadly the case in some instances.
But that tends to be for very short periods of time, not weeks and months or even years. As would have to be the case in a alien or passengers type voyage.
[00:03:00] Dallas Campbell: But presumably it'd be a useful thing if you were a colonizer on Mars or on the Moon and someone has an injury. Well, actually you need to not just to explore far away places, but
[00:03:09] Dr Martin Braddock: I think for example, you, you're absolutely right, Dallas. So let's just say that we're on, well, maybe if we're on the moon at least we can get people back relatively quickly. But if we're on Mars, somebody's had a serious accident, it's gonna take you six months to find the right window to be able to get people back to earth, let alone the travel time too.
What would we do to be able to manage that? Put them in some form of induced hibernation and and save their lives.
[00:03:37] Dallas Campbell: There are companies cause I'm sure I did a program about it or a podcast or something where they, companies that will freeze you people who are, have some incurable illness and they'll stick you in a vat...
[00:03:48] Dr Martin Braddock: yeah, yeah .
[00:03:49] Dallas Campbell: of something and you'll be frozen until they find a cure and then they'll bring you back
[00:03:53] Dr Martin Braddock: That's true. Cryogenics companies are around. I'm not sure how successful been.
[00:03:58] Dallas Campbell: Well, no one's. Well, yeah,
[00:04:00] Dr Martin Braddock: Not sure I'd like to put it to the test myself, but in theory, yeah, in theory.
[00:04:04] Dallas Campbell: There's this idea, I think it's, it is torpor isn't That's the word we use, isn't it?
William who was sitting there for our main episode who works here was talking about he'd been involved in some kind of,research into this as serious research.
[00:04:16] Dr Martin Braddock: there is certainly serious research being done into torpor.
There is research being done into what's calledgeroprotection, which is effectively anti-aging.
If we're serious about understanding what space does to the human body, there is, research I know that telomeres, the little bits of repeats at the end of our chromosomes shortened faster in space than they do on earth. Which tends to imply, that we age faster in space than on earth.
And I know there are some very nice studies that are being conducted in the UK for example, at the University of Oxford, trying to understand the effects of space on aging at a cellular level in the first instance. There are very good markers of the aging process that we can now map methylation markers of the DNA clock.
[00:05:03] Dallas Campbell: We can stop aging. Do you think?
[00:05:05] Dr Martin Braddock: We can understand perhaps how to slow it down. I'm not sure we can stop it.
[00:05:08] Dallas Campbell: And what are the implications of that? Are we gonna live for...
[00:05:11] Dr Martin Braddock: Well, the implications are that we would live...
[00:05:13] Dallas Campbell: biblical length of time.
[00:05:14] Dr Martin Braddock: Healthier lives, I think for longer. I don't think anybody would want to live a long life and not be healthy.
Um, Or at least I wouldn't. But I think the implications are we could live healthier lives for longer.
[00:05:27] Dallas Campbell: Everything at the moment seems to be a big hockey stick tick at the end of it. Space exploration, for example. Recently, access to space has seemed to become really quite exciting again and all sorts of possibilities. Do you think we're gonna see a revolution in health because of space?
[00:05:45] Dr Martin Braddock: I think there's the opportunity there to drive that revolution. I think it's up to the biopharm industry, the biotech industry to seize that opportunity,and I think the onus is on us perhaps all to help guide those industries, those of us that have been around and know the process, to highlight the examples, and to actually say, look, guys, here, there, there's an opportunity here.
We will provide you with X, Y, and Z. Can you use this in your drug discovery or drug development cascade? And if so, this is how to do it.
[00:06:16] Dallas Campbell: Do you think there's one thing in particular that drug development in space could really help?
[00:06:22] Dr Martin Braddock: The one area that I see where there is potentially immediate return is in helping at the early stage of drug discovery and what we call structural based drug design, which is the need to have a protein structure such that we can design drugs to block that proteins activity, and even with all of the advances in new technology, cryo-electron microscopy and alpha folds to the artificial intelligence program
[00:06:50] Dallas Campbell: I was gonna talk about AI.
[00:06:51] Dr Martin Braddock: I think even with that, there is most definitely a role for space born crystal studies to be able to help derive structures that will help our drug discovery.
And if that can be routine and included or not included, but either way, a decision point is made in a conventional drug discovery platform, I think that could open up a real opportunity. Not just for the space industry, but for biopharma itself.
[00:07:21] Dallas Campbell: See, I want to go into torpor. Just
[00:07:24] Dr Martin Braddock: You look even younger than I do.
[00:07:25] Dallas Campbell: I'd be no apart just because I wanna see what everything's gonna be like in 50 years time. '
cause it's gonna be so radical. Okay. Because you can imagine like the difference between somebody who lived in like the 15 hundreds to the 16 hundreds.
Eh. They kind of did the same kind of stuff. Things happen, but there's just radical change happening at the moment, and I think the next...
[00:07:46] Dr Martin Braddock: Absolutely breathtaking. So even within my relatively short to lifespan so far,the changes I've seen, I mean, the changes I've seen in drug discovery and drug development over my career have been astounding. Absolutely astounding. and you would've been laughed at if you'd suggested some of the changes 20 years ago even that this have happened today.
[00:08:07] Dallas Campbell: The big problem, of course, with going into, stasis, torpor, hibernation, whatever you want to call it for any long periods of time, is when you come back. When you come out of it, your email inbox is just gonna be absolutely rammed.
[00:08:21] Dr Martin Braddock: Can you imagine how many letters you'd have on your doormat as well when you got home?
[00:08:25] Dallas Campbell: Yeah.Thank you for sticking you around, talking further. It's been great to have you here, absolutely fascinating.
Congratulations and continue doing wonderful things. Thank you very much indeed, Martin.
[00:08:35] Dr Martin Braddock: Thank you Dallas.
[00:08:37] Dallas Campbell: To hear future episodes of In Orbit, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast app and head over to YouTube to watch the video versions of all of our discussions. And if you'd like to find out more about how Space is empowering your industry, visit the Catapult website or join them on social media.