Astronauts Could Grow Their Own Medicines in Space Using Plants

The pharmaceutical cabinet of the future might look a lot like a garden.

10 Jun 2026, 18:29 by Jordan Strickler · ZME Science

UC San Diego engineers are growing plants under simulated space conditions to explore their potential to produce pharmaceuticals in space. Credit: David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

When a spacecraft is millions of miles from Earth, a simple medical emergency can become a catastrophe. Medications degrade faster in space than they do on the ground. In fact, studies of the International Space Station’s drug supply found that more than half the medications on board had expired within three years — barely enough time for a round trip to Mars, which takes around 200 days each way. Resupply missions aren’t an option when you’re deep in interplanetary space.

Engineers at the University of California San Diego think they have a solution, and it’s surprisingly low-tech: grow your medicine like you’d grow a tomato.

Their new study, published in npj Science of Plants, demonstrates a simple method for producing and repeatedly harvesting pharmaceuticals from living plants under space-like conditions — without grinding the plants up, without a lab full of expensive equipment, and without generating mountains of biological waste.

Plants as Living Pharmacies

The idea of using plants to produce drugs isn’t new. What’s new here is figuring out how to do it cleanly and compactly enough to work on a spacecraft.

The team focused on a compound they’ve been studying for over a decade: cowpea mosaic virus (CPMV). Despite its unglamorous name, CPMV has shown a striking ability to wake up the immune system and direct it to attack tumors. It has demonstrated strong anti-tumor effects in mice and in clinical studies with canine cancer patients, and the compound is currently being explored as a human therapeutic.

To create CPMV, the researchers use two plant species: Nicotiana benthamiana (a relative of tobacco) and black-eyed pea plants. The plants are particularly effective at pumping out the compound quickly — more biomass, more product. The bottleneck has always been extraction.

“Growing the compound in these plants is simple,” said study first author Patrick Opdensteinen, a postdoctoral researcher. “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.”

The team’s solution was inspired by how bacterial and mammalian cells are used in pharmaceutical manufacturing. Instead of grinding the whole organism apart, you coax it into secreting the product.

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Plants naturally release material into the apoplast — a network of fluid-filled spaces between cells, tucked inside the leaf. The researchers found they could extract CPMV from the apoplast while leaving the plant entirely intact.

However, through their studies, the researchers have found how to make the extraction work. The leaves are submerged in a buffer solution and placed in a sealed container. A vacuum is applied, which floods the apoplast with liquid. The saturated leaves are then placed in small vials and gently centrifuged, drawing the CPMV-laden fluid back out. The resulting liquid gets passed through a filter that separates the larger virus particles from smaller plant debris.

The whole process is fast. Researchers harvested and purified CPMV from more than 50 plants in under two hours. And because the leaves stay alive, the same plants can be harvested repeatedly — turning them into renewable, on-demand pharmaceutical factories.

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Testing Under Space Conditions

To check whether the method would actually hold up beyond Earth, the team ran their plants through a gauntlet of space-like stressors.

To simulate microgravity, they teamed up with Maziar Ghazinejad’s lab in UC San Diego’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. Ghazinejad’s team normally uses random positioning machines — devices that continuously rotate samples to cancel out the effect of gravity — to study how materials behave in space. They custom-built one for the plants. The plants were also exposed to temperature swings and oxidative stress to mimic the punishing effects of space radiation.

The results were encouraging, and occasionally surprising. In some cases, the stressors actually increased CPMV yields. The researchers think they know why. Plants under stress become more susceptible to viral infection, and since CPMV is a plant virus, that vulnerability works in the researchers’ favor. Stress the plant slightly, and it produces more of the very compound you’re trying to harvest.

“Plants become more susceptible to disease when stressed, which is usually a disadvantage,” Opdensteinen said. “But since our product is derived from a plant virus, we can use that stress response to increase yields.”

The team is candid that there’s still a significant distance between this proof of concept and an astronaut tending their on-board drug garden en route to Mars.

Before any of this could fly, however, the researchers need a better understanding of how space conditions affect basic plant biology — how water moves, how nutrients are absorbed, how roots develop without a clear up-or-down. They’re also working with UC San Diego’s Rocket Propulsion Laboratory to study how rocket launches affect seeds and the genetic material used to prepare the plants.