In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at the U.K.’s first space launch license, growing mini-organs instead of transplanting them, nuclear reactors on the Moon and more. You can sign up to get The Prototype in your inbox here.
Skyrora CEO Volodymyr Levykin
Sportsfile via Getty Images
Glasgow, Scotland-based company Skyrora, which is developing rockets with 3D-printed engines, became the first U.K.-based company to be licensed to launch in the country this week. It’s a big step for the country’s space industry, which has historically been focused on satellite development and manufacturing. The new license gives a greenlight for the company to use its suborbital Skylark L rockets to carry payloads for its customers.
Next on the company’s agenda, CEO and founder Volodymyr Levykin told me, is to get an orbital launch license, which would enable its Skylark XL rocket to deliver satellites into Earth orbit. Its aim is to launch that rocket for the first time in the second half of 2026.
In the meantime, Levykin said, it’s using the large 3D printing facility that it has built for its rockets to generate revenue on its own by manufacturing parts for aerospace customers. “This is part of my long-term vision, to find revenue streams and leverage our experience,” he said. Those opportunities, he continued, could “potentially finance the space program itself rather than rely on external investors.”
Stay tuned.
This Startup Enables Patients Who Need Transplants To Grow New Mini-Organs
Lygensis scientist prepares liver cells for injection into the lymph node.
Lygenesis
Every year, over 50,000 patients die from liver disease in the United States. For many of these patients, a liver transplant is their only hope for treatment. But there often aren’t enough donor livers to go around, plus many patients aren’t eligible for liver transplant, often due to factors beyond their control.
Michael Hufford wants to change that. He’s the CEO of Pittsburgh-based Lygenesis, which has developed the technology to induce a patient’s own lymph nodes to grow miniature livers, which can carry out many of the liver’s functions and help patients stay healthy.
Lymph nodes are the body’s own miniature cellular factories, constantly building cells that help the immune system fight off disease. What Lygenesis does is to take advantage of this factory plus the liver’s own ability to regenerate itself. It extracts a special kind of liver cell called hepatocytes from a donor organ and then injects them into a lymph node. (Your body has several hundred of them so it won’t miss a handful if you use them for something else.)
Once inside the lymph node, the liver cells induce it to start growing a miniature version of a liver, called an ectopic organ, which has the same function as the original. The process is very efficient, Huffard said. The company estimates that one donor liver has enough hepatocytes to be used to grow new organs in up to 75 patients.
Right now, Lygenesis’ technology is already being tested on patients in a small clinical trial that has enrolled four people with end-stage liver disease. It’s also planning on ramping up and enrolling more patients in another study testing different aspects of the potential treatment. The first set of data from these trials are expected in early 2027.
But Lygenesis isn’t only focused on the liver, Huffard said. It’s also working on inducing lymph nodes to produce other ectopic organs, including the kidneys to treat renal disease, the pancreas to treat type 1 diabetes and the thymus to treat age-related issues and autoimmune disease.
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: A PLANET AROUND OUR CLOSEST NEIGHBOR
Images from the Webb Space Telescope suggest that there’s a gas giant orbiting Alpha Centauri A, which, at just over 4 light-years away, is the closest Sun-like star to Earth. If confirmed, this would be the first time a planet sitting that close to its star was directly imaged by a telescope. The new planet, a gas giant about the size of Saturn, is close enough to the star to maintain life-supporting temperatures, and while life likely couldn’t exist on the planet itself, if it has moons similar to those around Saturn or Jupiter, life might be able to survive on those.
FINAL FRONTIER: A NUCLEAR REACTOR ON THE MOON
Earlier this week, acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said that the agency plans to put a working nuclear fission reactor on the Moon before the decade is out. But as my colleague Chris Helman writes, this isn’t a new goal for NASA, which has been working on this project for over a decade. In 2022, it issued $5 million grants to three different companies to develop working designs. The goal of a reactor is to power a continuous human presence on the Moon. Nuclear is more practical than solar in this regard, since nighttime on the Moon can last for 14 days.
WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK
In my other newsletter, InnovationRx, Amy Feldman and I looked at the Trump Administration’s latest demands on drug pricing, a biotech entrepreneur treating a rare genetic disease, a company building virtual cell models for drug discovery, and more.
I filled in again this week on my colleague Thomas Brewster’s cybersecurity newsletter, The Wiretap, where I looked at how AI threatens the security of IT systems, a million-dollar prize for finding a WhatsApp bug, and more.
SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS
Does infinity exist? Scientific American profiles a branch of mathematics that is based on the idea that infinity is impossible, since the universe itself is finite. This is tough to implement in practice, because a lot of advanced mathematics revolves around sets of infinite numbers. However, some are hopeful that this math could be useful at tackling some difficult problems in physics that are currently unsolved.
Shares prices of Firefly Aerospace, the commercial space company whose Blue Ghost lander touched down on the Moon earlier this year, jumped more than 30% to over $60 during its initial public offering on Thursday.
Fake and low-quality studies are being churned out faster and faster, threatening to undermine scientific integrity, especially in more specialized fields, as well-conducted research gets drowned out.
Nuclear power startup Radiant, which is developing portable nuclear microreactors that can fit in a shipping container, signed a deal to provide reactors to the Air Force that will be installed on military bases.
PRO SCIENCE TIP: TROUBLE SLEEPING? TRY EXERCISE
Do you have trouble falling asleep, waking up or just feel like you’re not getting good sleep? Try exercising more often. That’s the conclusion of a new study which finds that people who exercised more frequently also got better sleep quality than those who exercised less often. This conclusion was reached by gathering Fitbit data from 69 young men and women over the course of several months. They found that those who exercised more often during the week–even just 10 minutes or so of vigorous activity–were more likely to get deep restorative sleep. This was the case even when the total amount of exercise during the week was about the same.
WHAT’S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK
I recently finished Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose. It’s a history of the Culper Ring, a group of spies–mostly all childhood friends from Long Island–who helped keep Washington apprised of British activity in occupied New York City during the Revolutionary War, and who also discovered Benedict Arnold’s planned treason. It’s an excellent read that provides a wealth of detail about the beginnings of modern espionage.
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