Forming Micro-gRx

In 2011, while working as a drug discovery pharmacologist in the growing Medical City at Lake Nona,  a suburb of Orlando, Dr. Malany was invited to the STS-134 Endeavour launch,  the next to last Space Shuttle launch at the Kennedy Space Center.  While there, she met a teacher and scientist involved with science payloads.  The following week, she attended a workshop and listened to student presentations highlighting suborbital experiments and learned about equipment intended to be placed on the International Space Station,  some common equipment that she used every day in her lab.  When Space Florida and NanoRacks announced a research competition to send an experiment in a 10 x 10 cm box, she applied and won (see CRS-4 mission). Her logo was Micro-gRx.  This sparked an interest in space related science that would trigger a new direction in how Dr. Malany sought funding for her projects.  With seed money from Space Florida and CASIS, her logo became a company and she founded Micro-gRx in 2014.

Today, the Micro-gRx technology team is spearheaded by former space shuttle engineer and current NASA space launch system (SLS) engineer Lee Malany.  Dr. Malany invited Lee to the Cygnus (NG-10) mission in 2018. (Incidentally, Lee had been part of the team that designed and built the launch pad at Wallops Flight Facility). After several pre-launch hardware anomalies and weather delays, Lee shifted his extensive years of aerospace experience into high gear and helped to get the Micro-gRx payload prepared for launch!  Dr. Malany realized that with her brother’s expertise in aerospace engineering combined with he pharmacology background, they could uniquely solve issues related to integrating biology platforms with payload hardware. Lee joined Micro-gRx as its chief technology officer in 2019 and is part of the Tissue Chips in Space project funded by the National Institutes of Health in partnership with NASA.