Entrepreneur: use ISS for improved drug discovery

Wired has a neat little story about the possibility of partially commercializing the International Space Station in the interest of improved drug discovery:

Drug discovery is an arduous and extremely expensive project. But in space, molecules do miraculous things. Disease-causing proteins crystallize so well -- growing larger and clearer -- that finding a drug to stop the protein's damaging activities could happen months, if not years, faster....

"Up in space, the crystals grow bigger and better," said Tim Osslund, who specializes in protein formulation at Amgen. "The end result is higher resolution." And that resolution is a very valuable thing.

Osslund sent some of the company's proteins to the Mir space station in 1998. His crystals grew 32 times larger in space than in an earth-grown control environment. Larger, better crystals allow scientists to see a protein at the atomic level. That kind of detail can significantly accelerate drug discovery.

Given that money is in short supply for funding the ISS, and that profit margins on successful new drugs are rather vast, this seems like an ideal fit in certain ways. Certainly the promise of the ISS, that of scientific discovery in orbit, would be fulfilled by this turn of events. Plus, space pills would be, like, super cool.