With its first voyage, planned for later this year, the Dream Chaser will make history as the only commercial runway capable spaceplane. The launch will also be a momentous occasion for University of Notre Dame researcher Meenal Datta. Among the spaceplane’s cargo, contained within a specially designed CubeLab, will be an experiment designed by Datta and her students.

When the spaceplane reaches the International Space Station (ISS), it will deposit the CubeLab. The fully-automated experiment will take place aboard the ISS for several weeks before it returns it to Earth.

When Datta, an assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, set out to make breakthroughs in cancer research, she never envisioned that those breakthroughs would take place 250 miles above Earth’s surface. Datta completed her engineering doctorate at Tufts University and her postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. Along the way, she developed lab-based techniques for studying incurable cancers and why they resist treatment.

Then, a few years ago, through a discussion with Notre Dame colleague Tengfei Luo, the Dorini Family Professor for Energy Studies, she discovered the benefits of microgravity.

“Microgravity is what it sounds like: less gravity,” Datta explains. “But how is this possible, given that there is still a fair amount of gravity where the International Space Station and other space vessels orbit? The weightlessness is actually achieved by placing the space station in a continuous free-fall orbit around the Earth.”

Luo used the microgravity environment of space to enhance methods to detect microplastics and cancer biomarkers in fluid samples. Datta saw that microgravity could also provide benefits for her research as well, especially as an environment for creating organoids, three-dimensional structures that mimic tissues in the body that researchers can use to observe cancer growth.

Datta, who is an affiliated faculty member in the University’s Harper Cancer Research Institute, had spent years studying how cancerous tumors form and grow in the lab. Her lab devised techniques to develop organoids, but lab-grown structures had limitations. The most important was that they tended to lack regularity due to the force of gravity, making robust and reproducible experimentation (such as drug testing) difficult. She hypothesized that by growing organoids in microgravity, she could achieve a more accurate experiment that mimicked tumor behavior in the body.

She began to collaborate with space companies like Sierra Space, the Colorado-based business behind Dream Chaser, SpaceX, Redwire Space, Space Tango, which designed the CubeLab, and others, and in March of 2024, she sent her first-ever experiment to the ISS as an initial proof of concept. To make the best use of the opportunity, Datta and her lab prepared dozens of fully automated experiments that would occur simultaneously, using the CubeLab as a high capacity incubator in space.

“The brilliance of the system is that it allows for high-throughput experiments,” Datta says. “But we don’t get to repeat them like we can on the ground, we’re limited to whatever we send to the station. So we must plan ahead and think through every possible condition and variation.”

At the same time, Datta and her team conducted experiments in the lab (“ground controls”) to mirror those occurring in space to provide a set of data for comparisons.

Datta’s hypothesis was correct.

“Once we retrieved the space-grown organoids and compared them to our ground controls, we began to see that the organoids developed in microgravity recapitulate what we would expect to see in the body better than traditional lab-based methods,” she says.

Datta also notes that an additional advantage of the microgravity environment may lie in the way it accelerates research. The team found that not only do organoids develop more uniformly in size and shape in microgravity, but they also develop more quickly.

Discovering how quickly they develop and how effectively they mimic the tumor environment in the body is a major focus of Datta’s next wave of research, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and Notre Dame Research.

“It’s important to understand how much less time it takes to do an experiment in space,” Datta says. “What if, for example, it takes me two months on the ground to grow an organoid, but I can do it in two weeks on the space station? That ultimately means I'm going to learn answers to other questions a lot faster and begin to potentially accelerate the rate of progress not only for the scientific field but potentially for personalized medicine as well.”

Datta and her lab are currently preparing and refining a new set of experiments for the upcoming flight, and she is also finding new ways to let students in on her passion. In addition to teaching the course Physiology for Engineers: On Earth and in Space, Datta is helping students discover paths into the rapidly growing space industry.

Over spring break 2025, Datta was the faculty mentor for a group of Notre Dame undergraduates on a “Space Trek” organized by Jo Anne Mackay Nasti (‘79) at Notre Dame’s Meruelo Family Center for Career Development. The trip offered students an opportunity to visit major space industry sites and organizations, including NASA headquarters, Axiom Space, SpaceX, and other sites in and around “Space City,” Houston, Texas. Students were able to tour facilities and hear directly from Notre Dame alumni working within each organization.

“It’s important for students to have these experiences,” Datta says. “The space industry is going to be a major force in shaping our future over the decades to come, and I think that future is brighter the more Notre Dame students we have involved, bringing their values and their passion to the work they’re doing.”

In addition to her affiliation with the Harper Cancer Research Institute, Datta is an affiliate of the Eck Institute for Global Health, the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health, NDnano, the Warren Center for Drug Discovery, the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society, and the Boler-Parseghian Center for Rare and Neglected Diseases. She is a concurrent faculty member in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and a faculty advisor for Notre Dame’s graduate programs in Bioengineering and Materials Science and Engineering.

Datta also leads the IMPACT (Immunoengineering Microgravity Platform for Accessible Cell-based Therapies) project, which recently received funding from Notre Dame’s Bioengineering & Life Sciences Initiative, a key priority of the University’s strategic framework.

Contact:

Brett Beasley / Research Content Strategy Program Director
Notre Dame Research / University of Notre Dame
bbeasle1@nd.edu / +1 574-631-8183
research.nd.edu / @UNDResearch

About Notre Dame Research:

The University of Notre Dame is a private research and teaching university inspired by its Catholic mission. Located in South Bend, Indiana, its researchers are advancing human understanding through research, scholarship, education, and creative endeavor in order to be a repository for knowledge and a powerful means for doing good in the world. For more information, please see research.nd.edu or @UNDResearch.