Oral Roberts University is set to take some of its research to the stars.
Former NASAadministrator and Oklahoma congressman Jim Bridenstine announced he is helping partner the university with space companies to further research medicine.
Bridenstine served NASA's administrator from 2018 to 2021. He served five years in Congress.
He told 2 News the university's research impressed him. It also impressed Redwire, an aerospace manufacturer and space infrastructure technology. Bridenstine said the Florida-based company signed "a memorandum of understanding" with ORU this week.
"We recognize that talent here on campus," Rich Boling, the vice president for corporate advancement at Redwire, told 2 News. "And we're just eager to get to know one another through this agreement, first, and look for ways where we can collaborate to benefit humanity."
The research will focus heavily on medicine. Bridenstine hopes they can research how micro-gravity can help in that.
"Microgravity gives you an opportunity to create new things that can't be created in the gravity of Earth," he explained. "For example, pharmaceutical crystals are one area where we can create not just better drugs, but we can create new and different types of drugs."
He said the way pharmaceutical crystals form in space is much different than on Earth, he said microgravity could improve current drugs and make new ones.
"When you create the same crystals in space, they are so pure and so uniform that it can improve their efficacy by a matter of 10 times," said Bridenstine. "It’s really that significant.”
He said microgravity is an emerging market that Oklahoma needs to enter while it's still brand-new.
While he noted that the research already happening at ORU is "pretty impressive," he hopes this partnership between the university and companies, like Redwire, can take research further and potentially get them federal grants.
One university official found this prospect exciting.
"Imagine with me for a second, artificial eyes being designed up there because of microgravity design. That's phenomenal," Mike Mathews, the vice president for innovation and technology at ORU, told 2 News. "But they get shipped back to Earth so people can be healed by what was manufactured in the space station."
"This is why NASA loves it when we partner academia, with industry, and U.S. government resources like the National Institute of Health or the National Science Foundation or NASA," said Bridenstine. "That's where these programs become tremendously valuable."
"We're training the next generation of scientists and engineers to make the discoveries that are going to fundamentally transform how we live and work here on Earth," he added.
The former NASA chief emphasized to us that this is only the beginning, saying he wants to work with all universities here and take advantage of their differing specialties.
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