Ariel Ekblaw

speaker

1,219 appearances 5 recordings 4 series first heard May 2025 last heard 26 Jun

Ariel Ekblaw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson · The Future of Space Stations with Ariel Ekblaw · 29 May 2026 podcast

Exactly.

Low Earth orbit manufacturing, ball bearings, tissue engineering, fiber optic cable.

Yes.

They'll be brought in.

It's true.

And a great example of that is Merck's cancer drug, Keytruda.

It's a $30 billion cancer drug.

That's right.

They took it to space.

to figure out, they basically did a parameter sweep looking at the crystallization of the drug in space.

And the amazing thing for Keytruda is they figured out a way to get more precise, consistent size of the crystallization of the drug, and it took it from an IV drug to a shot.

So huge for patient quality of life.

You don't have to go into a hospital to get Keytruda.

Well, what they did, that's the magic of some of the tools now that we have on Earth.

To your earlier point that some of the things on Earth are getting so close to being good for space, for the Keytruda, the cancer drug, they use space to do this parameter sweep of a bunch of data that would have been really hard to get on Earth.

And then they figured out what it was.

Exactly.

Exactly right.

But then they were able to figure out how to mimic part of the parameters that they did get in space on the ground so they don't have to make every dose of Keytruda on the International Space Station.

So there's two examples, tissue engineering, it's physical, it's at a macro scale, even though we think of it as tiny, it's really macro scale for biology.

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