Study Ranks 26 Peptide Therapeutics for On-Demand Production During Deep Space Missions

Future crewed missions beyond Earth orbit — to the Moon, Mars, and beyond — will last years rather than weeks, and that timeline breaks the traditional pharmaceutical supply chain. Medications degrade faster in space due to radiation exposure and imperfect storage conditions, and hauling large stockpiles of temperature-controlled biologics across millions of miles is simply not practical. That has researchers looking seriously at in-situ, or "on-demand," drug manufacturing as a way to keep deep space crews medically self-sufficient.

A new study published July 9, 2026 in npj Microgravity, led by researchers from the University of Nottingham's School of Pharmacy along with collaborators at UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine and Stanford University School of Medicine, takes a structured look at which peptide therapeutics are best suited for this kind of production in orbit or transit. The team evaluated 26 spaceflight-relevant peptide-based medications against a purpose-built scoring framework.

The researchers scored each peptide against ten criteria split across two categories. The first, Operational and Clinical Relevance (OCR), covers regulatory status, shelf stability, storage requirements, a NASA Human Research Roadmap risk/impact score, and purification requirements — essentially, how badly a mission would need the drug and how hard it currently is to keep it usable in space. The second category, Recombinant Production Feasibility (RPF), covers amino acid chain length, prior history of recombinant production, availability of functional assays, dosing requirements, and complexity of post-translational modifications.

Each of the ten criteria was scored from 0 to 2 points, giving every therapeutic a combined score out of 20. Peptides with short chains, well-established production methods, and low post-translational modification complexity naturally scored better on the manufacturability side, while those with strong mission-relevance and storage challenges scored higher on the clinical side.

Teriparatide, a parathyroid hormone fragment, came out on top with a score of 17 out of 20, followed closely by abaloparatide and amylin, each scoring 16. A second tier of candidates — including angiotensin II, daptomycin, GLP-1 agonists, G-CSF, GM-CSF, and salmon calcitonin — scored 14 out of 20, reflecting solid but slightly less ideal combinations of relevance and producibility.

The authors frame this as a structured starting point rather than a final verdict, offering future astropharmacy research a way to prioritize which peptides deserve investment in recombinant production methods suited for orbital or deep-space environments. For a research-focused peptide industry, it's a useful signal of where synthesis, formulation, and stability work may be headed next. For research use only. Not for human consumption.

Q: What does "on-demand" peptide production in space mean?

A: It refers to manufacturing a therapeutic peptide in-situ, aboard a spacecraft or habitat, using recombinant biological production methods, rather than shipping a pre-made, pre-packaged supply from Earth.

Q: Why do medications degrade faster in space than on Earth?

A: The study cites radiation exposure and difficult-to-maintain storage conditions (such as temperature control) as key factors that accelerate degradation of many pharmaceuticals during long-duration spaceflight.

Q: What is the difference between the OCR and RPF scores?

A: OCR (Operational and Clinical Relevance) measures how mission-critical and currently hard-to-store a peptide is, while RPF (Recombinant Production Feasibility) measures how straightforward that peptide would be to manufacture recombinantly, based on factors like chain length and prior production history.

Q: Why did teriparatide score highest?

A: It combined a relatively short amino acid chain, an established history of recombinant production, and a favorable profile across the study's clinical and operational criteria, landing a combined score of 17 out of 20.

Donovan, J.J., Ericson, I., Wenthe, A. et al. "On-demand peptide therapeutics for multi-year space exploration: analysis of clinical and operational relevance and recombinant production feasibility." npj Microgravity (2026). nature.com