Plants Could Be Used to Grow Medicines in Space, Study Shows
story<br>Jacobs School of Engineering<br>Health Innovation<br>Space
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Plants Could Be Used to Grow Medicines in Space, Study Shows
UC San Diego engineers are growing plants in simulated space conditions to explore their potential for producing pharmaceuticals in space. Photos by David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering
Story by:
Liezel Labios
llabios@ucsd.edu
Published Date
June 05, 2026
Story by:
Liezel Labios
llabios@ucsd.edu
Topics covered:
Pharmaceutical Production
Plant Molecular Farming
Plant Virus
Space
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Article Content
Key Takeaways
Plants are a promising option for growing on-demand medicines for astronauts during long-duration space missions.<br>Toward this goal, UC San Diego engineers developed a new technique to extract plant-grown medicine from plant leaves without harming the plant.<br>The project is ongoing, and the team hopes that astronauts will test their techniques to harvest medicines grown in plants on an actual space mission in the future.
Astronauts on long space missions may one day use plants to produce fresh stocks of medicines on demand, thanks to new research by engineers at the University of California San Diego. The team developed a simple method to grow and repeatedly harvest pharmaceuticals from plants under space-like conditions, without destroying the plants or generating large amounts of waste. The method could also help bring low-cost pharmaceutical production to resource-limited areas on Earth.
The findings were published on June 5 in npj Science of Plants.
One of the biggest challenges of space travel is keeping astronauts supplied with safe, effective medications. Many drugs degrade more quickly in space. Even aboard the International Space Station, more than half of the medications stocked there have been found to expire within three years. That’s barely long enough for a trip to Mars, which can take around 200 days each way. Regularly resupplying medications simply isn’t feasible millions of miles from Earth.
Plants offer a promising solution because they can act as mini factories for pharmaceuticals.
Nicole Steinmetz, professor of chemical and nano engineering at UC San Diego, examines a tray of plants cultivated in her lab.
“With plants, you can grow complex therapeutic compounds using light, water and soil,” said study senior author Nicole Steinmetz, the Leo and Trude Szilard Chancellor's Endowed Chair in the Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.
That’s a big advantage over current pharmaceutical manufacturing systems that require giant tanks and sterile environments. Plus, plants are already cultivated in space and can help recycle air and water aboard spacecraft.
Producing an Experimental Drug from Plants
Steinmetz and colleagues demonstrated the idea using an experimental therapeutic compound that they have been studying for more than a decade: a plant virus called cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV). While CPMV is more commonly known for infecting legumes, Steinmetz’s team knows it for its ability to stimulate the immune system to attack cancer cells. CPMV has shown strong anti-tumor effects in preclinical mouse models and in clinical studies in canine cancer patients.
CPMV is grown from plants in this chamber.
To make CPMV, Steinmetz’s team uses Nicotiana benthamiana and black-eyed pea plants. “Growing the compound in these plants is simple,” said study first author Patrick Opdensteinen, a postdoctoral researcher in Steinmetz’s lab. “They can produce a whole lot of biomass in a short amount of time, and more biomass equals more product. The main difficulty now is figuring out how to get the product out of the plants.”
Extracting CPMV — and other pharmaceutical products — from plants typically involves picking the leaves and grinding them in a blender. “You end up with something that looks like a smoothie, and you can imagine getting your product out of that smoothie is challenging,” Opdensteinen said. “The equipment that we use to do this fills our entire lab. You can’t fit all that on a spacecraft.”
The new study focused on simplifying that step.
The team was inspired by an approach used with bacterial and mammalian cells in pharmaceutical manufacturing: product secretion. “Basically, the product comes out of these cells,” Opdensteinen said. “This is possible in plants, too.” Plants secrete products into a compartment inside the leaves called the apoplast, which is a network of interconnected spaces outside of the plasma membrane.
Patrick Opdensteinen, a postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, begins a...