How Pittsburgh Will Conquer Space

If the biosciences are to medicine what steel was to manufacturing, then Pittsburgh is on the cusp of its next great economic boom.

Ashok Trivedi believes that we are.

Trivedi is so bullish on the biological sciences that he endowed the just-launched $25 million Trivedi Institute for Space and Global Medicine at the University of Pittsburgh. A first-of-its-kind initiative, the Trivedi Institute aims to advance healthcare on Earth by applying the lessons learned from humans in space.

“Years ago, Pittsburgh was the Silicon Valley of the Industrial Age,” said Trivedi, referring to early industrial pioneers such as Carnegie, Westinghouse and Heinz, and, later, Drs. Jonas Salk and Thomas Detri. “Now we have the opportunity to build on this rich legacy by becoming the powerhouse of a new age of biomedicine.”

A physicist who immigrated to the U.S. from India on a student visa and ended up in Pittsburgh for a job in computing, Trivedi has a track record of prescience. In the mid-1980s, when he was all in on the future of open system architecture, he and partner Sunil Wadhwani founded two IT companies, Mastech and later iGate — ventures that ultimately generated the wealth he’s now investing in education, technology and other causes important to his family.

Today, Trivedi is all in on biosciences. He’s confident that the Trivedi Institute will seed new life sciences and space-adjacent businesses in Pittsburgh.

“It’s where ideas can become new discoveries and turn into new companies,” he said. “The economic impact can be profound.”

PITTSBURGH BECKONS
The Trivedi Institute is off to a rocketing start. Pitt successfully enticed the superstar retired astronaut Kate Rubins to join the Institute as a founding member and its first director.

A palpable spirit of collaboration is why Rubins, who holds a Ph.D. in cancer biology from Stanford University, chose Pittsburgh and the Trivedi Institute over five other employment offers after retiring from NASA.

“Pittsburgh was very different from everywhere else I went,” she said. “Here, every person I met wasn’t just nice; they had concrete ideas of how we all could work together. You can hit the ground running here.”

In addition to Rubins, the Trivedi Institute launched with what Ashok Trivedi describes as a “dream team” of inaugural scientists, each with deep experience in their own space-related specialties: Chris Mason, Ph.D., the Institute’s co-director; Afshin Beheshti, Ph.D., director of the Institute’s Center for Space Biomedicine; and Sylvain Costes, Ph.D., director of the Institute’s Center for Space Biomanufacturing, Synthetic Biology and Digital Health.

Pitt School of Medicine Dean Dr. Anantha Shekhar calls them the “Fab Four.” The trailblazer and connector of the team, he said, is Beheshti, the first of the team to join Pitt in 2024.

“We like each other,” said Beheshti. “We’re all good friends and that chemistry is important. Everything we’re doing is to help humanity.”

“I WANT TO BE AN ASTRONAUT”

Over the past decade, all four of the dream team have worked together on numerous NASA projects, though Rubins is the only one to have experienced space.

Her path to NASA may have been predestined. Like Trivedi, Rubins was blessed with both self-assurance and foresight. Ever since she was 5, when someone asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, her answer was “astronaut, biologist and geologist,” she said. “I got really interested in science and space simultaneously.”

While Trivedi was building his first startup, Mastech, Rubins, as a seventh-grader in Napa, California, was enthralled with space camp. She had saved the $3 an hour she earned for chores around the house to put toward this experience.

Yet even as Rubins pursued biology, the dream of flying to space, inspired by evenings of stargazing with her dad, always remained. As an undergrad at the University of California, San Diego, Rubins worked in a lab studying HIV prevention, an interest since high school. After graduating from Stanford, she started a lab of her own at MIT, researching infectious diseases that are common in Central and West Africa.

While at MIT, a friend who remembered that Rubins had always wanted to be an astronaut sent her a job posting at NASA. Never imagining that NASA would recruit a biologist, Rubins applied anyway. In 2009, she added “astronaut” to her resume.

“YOU FEEL GREAT IN SPACE”
During her NASA career, Rubins spent 300 days on the International Space Station and conducted four space walks. In addition, she was the first person to sequence DNA in space — an accomplishment intrinsically relevant in her new role as director of the Trivedi Institute.

“Space changes our biology in ways that we’ve never seen before here on Earth,” said Rubins. Once the body adjusts to the microgravity of space, all of the aches and pains you might have experienced on Earth go away, she said.

But they come back with a vengeance upon landing. “The physical impacts of being in space resemble what we see in aging,” shared Rubins.

When Rubins emerged from the space capsule, she felt like an 85-year-old, she said. She was arthritic and experienced cardiovascular symptoms and balance issues. “They don’t let you walk right away,” she acknowledged.

But the body recovers quickly. Within three or four days, Rubins was walking and within a few weeks, she could drive and run again. The back pain she experienced as a result of muscle degradation in space got better.

Understanding this rapid recovery and how to translate it into revolutionary healthcare diagnoses and treatments for humans on Earth is the core of the Institute’s work.

FLY ME TO VENUS AND MARS
In addition to applying insights from spaceflight to diagnosing and developing treatments for back pain, osteoporosis, long Covid, ALS and other chronic and complicated maladies, the Institute will study how to better care for humans in space — not just astronauts, but also civilian travelers.

Some of this work will center on making medical tools smaller and more autonomous. While you can’t take a giant MRI machine to a tiny space station, if you can miniaturize sophisticated devices (think at-home Covid tests), their portability will make them applicable not only in space, but also in rural communities where hospitals have closed, in remote environments like the Democratic Republic of Congo where Rubins worked, and for patients anywhere who are too sick to travel to a medical center.
Identifying life on other planets is another study area of the Institute. This is a passion of co-director Mason, author of The Next 500 Years: Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds, among other publications.

Thanks to Rubins’ successful sequencing of DNA in space — a key highlight of the innovative work that Rubins and Mason co-published in 2016 — disease can now be detected in space. “If you get sick in space, we now have the genetic tools to detect, diagnose and treat it,” said Mason.

The same genetic tools can enable the detection of life on other planets, he said. In fact, projects involving Venus and Mars are on the new Institute’s research plate.

“A whole new era of humanity is in front of us,” said Mason. “It’s not science fiction, but actually happening. Twenty years ago it would have sounded crazy to say this; now the technology has matured. Wouldn’t it be amazing to find life somewhere else in the universe?”

ROOTED IN PITTSBURGH
Beyond finding and sustaining life in space, the vision for the Institute is to become the hub of global progress in space medicine, connecting researchers, entrepreneurs and “citizen scientists” in the mission of helping humanity.

And it’s all happening in Pittsburgh.

If Ashok Trivedi is right, as the Institute grows, it will attract esteemed faculty to Pitt and CMU, an Institute partner. Undergraduate, graduate and doctoral students will flock to Pittsburgh to be part of this space-age work. Scientific discoveries at the Institute will spin-off technology transfers and startup companies here. Entrepreneurs from across the country and around the world will relocate to the region to collaborate and be close to developing technologies. Manufacturers will build new devices here. High school students will be exposed to careers they otherwise might not have considered.

The possibilities are out of this world.

“My hope for the Institute is to put Pittsburgh on the world map again. It’s a new opportunity for a new age, and the new age is biomedicine,” Trivedi declared.

“No one is an expert in the entire field of space,” noted Beheshti, not even the Institute’s dream team. “We welcome collaborators. Come work with us.”