There are medical treatment vulnerabilities in longer-duration space missions present in the current International Space Station crew health care system with risks, arising from spaceflight-accelerated pharmaceutical degradation and resupply lag times. Bioregenerative life support systems may be a way to close this risk gap by leveraging in situ resource utilization (ISRU) to perform pharmaceutical synthesis and purification. Recent literature has begun to consider biological ISRU using microbes and plants as the basis for pharmaceutical life support technologies. However, there has not yet been a rigorous analysis of the processing and quality systems required to implement biologically produced pharmaceuticals for human medical treatment. In this work, we use the equivalent system mass (ESM) metric to evaluate pharmaceutical purification processing strategies for longer-duration space exploration missions. Monoclonal antibodies, representing a diverse therapeutic platform capable of treating multiple space-relevant disease states, were selected as the target products for this analysis. We investigate the ESM resource costs (mass, volume, power, cooling, and crew time) of an affinity-based capture step for monoclonal antibody purification as a test case within a manned Mars mission architecture. We compare six technologies (three biotic capture methods and three abiotic capture methods), optimize scheduling to minimize ESM for each technology, and perform scenario analysis to consider a range of input stream compositions and pharmaceutical demand. We also compare the base case ESM to scenarios of alternative mission configuration, equipment models, and technology reusability. Throughout the analyses, we identify key areas for development of pharmaceutical life support technology and improvement of the ESM framework for assessment of bioregenerative life support technologies.

The virus-based immunosorbent nanoparticle is a nascent technology being developed to serve as a simple and efficacious agent in biosensing and therapeutic antibody purification. There has been particular emphasis on the use of plant virions as immunosorbent nanoparticle chassis for their diverse morphologies and accessible, high yield manufacturing via plant cultivation. To date, studies in this area have focused on proof-of-concept immunosorbent functionality in biosensing and purification contexts. Here we consolidate a previously reported pro-vector system into a single Agrobacterium tumefaciens vector to investigate and expand the utility of virus-based immunosorbent nanoparticle technology for therapeutic protein purification. We demonstrate the use of this technology for Fc-fusion protein purification, characterize key nanomaterial properties including binding capacity, stability, reusability, and particle integrity, and present an optimized processing scheme with reduced complexity and increased purity. Furthermore, we present a coupling of virus-based immunosorbent nanoparticles with magnetic particles as a strategy to overcome limitations of the immunosorbent nanoparticle sedimentation-based affinity capture methodology. We report magnetic separation results which exceed the binding capacity reported for current industry standards by an order of magnitude.