The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and pharmaceutical companies like Merck have collaborated to send drug formulation experiments to the International Space Station (ISS). Scientists from Merck, not traditionally part of the space sector, worked with astronauts and NASA engineers to study how protein crystallization behaves in microgravity. This helped improve drug design on Earth, especially for cancer treatments, and demonstrated the value of space-based R&D to the pharma industry.