An interview with Dr. Katie King, leading scientist specialising in nanomedicine

CREATION.co CEO Daniel Ghinn recently interviewed Dr. Katie King, CEO of BIOORBIT and a leading nanoscientist, on her hopes to improve care for cancer patients by making available subcutaneous injections, created in space. Dr. King has a PhD in nanomedicine, is an ambassador of Tech She Can and is a Codex 2024 top female innovator who is passionate about utilising space for the benefit of humankind.

The future of space medicine

In her conversation with Daniel, Dr. King shares her hopes to completely change the current care for cancer patients through her attempt to mass manufacture medicines in space.  By working in microgravity scientists could create antibody treatments in a way they are unable to on Earth, allowing future cancer patients to be treated at home. Although this may sound like something in the distant future, Dr. King believes we will see an increase in developments around space medicine over the next 10 years.

The benefits of working in space

Dr. King explains the current issue that makes it challenging to create antibody treatments for patients to use at home is the crystallisation process. In simple terms, if you use crystals to create an intravenous antibody solution on Earth, it becomes too thick and gloopy to be able to be injected subcutaneously. However, the causes of these issues, convection currents and sedimentation, do not occur in microgravity. Therefore, producing these treatments in space would result in the creation of reproducible batches of highly concentrated subcutaneous injections which patients could use to treat themselves at home. 

Challenges

A key challenge Dr. King sees is adapting current regulations for the space environment. Currently, she is working with regulators to educate them on her plans and understand the evidence and datasets regulators would require. Alongside this, her team is working on building hardware that will enable this new manufacturing method to be deployed at scale. Her grand vision is to create a free-standing manufacturing facility in space with leading scientists trained as astronauts. 

Role of social media 

For Dr. King, social media plays two key roles: to inspire the next generation of scientists and to engage with her peers. She is a big advocate for educating and sharing knowledge with the next generation so they can progress such ideas even further.  In the same way as other Digital Opinion Leaders we have interviewed in this podcast series, Dr. King uses different social media channels to reach the different audiences she wants to engage.  For example, Dr. King will use Instagram to reach the younger generation and inspire them about what is possible, whilst she uses LinkedIn primarily to engage with her peers and discuss how the sector is moving through a two-way dialogue approach. 

We look forward to following Dr. King’s journey with nanomedicine and seeing how things progress over the next few years.

Dr. King is on Instagram and LinkedIn. You can watch the full interview with Dr. Katie King below: