Hi, it's Ira Flato, and you're listening to Science Friday.

Studying cancer and how tumors form is difficult, so that's why some experts are taking their research off world.

Five, four, three, two, one, ignition, and lift up, go SpaceX, COVID-R-R-1172.

Tumors will soon be sent to the International Space Station

to see how they'll grow and change in a weightless environment.

It turns out that tumors grow in space at a startling rate.

What would take 10 years on Earth to triple in size in space takes just 10 days.

So what does that mean for science and for the astronauts?

To researchers behind those projects are here now, to tell us why space is the new frontier for tumor research.

Let me introduce them. Dr. Katrina Jameson is a hematologist at the UC San Diego Health

Moores Cancer Center in California. And Dr. Mino Data studies the physics of cancer at the University

of Notre Dame's College of Engineering in Indiana. Welcome to Science

Friday. Thanks, Ira. Thank you so much for having us. Nice to have you. Dr. Jameson, here's a

million-dollar question. What's the benefit of taking cancer research to space? Well, I would say that's a

multi-billion dollar question, because if we can solve this problem,

it helps all of us.

One in three of us is going to get cancer at one point in our lives, and everyone will have a family

member, close friend who gets cancer.

But I would say cancer is a catalyst for cancer research, because as you mentioned, Ira,

in our experiments in Axi 1, 2, 3, and 4 missions, and now what we're

launching with this NASA-Casis mission, we're really aiming to see why cancer divides so quickly

in space.

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