President and Founder, Micro-gRX
Dr. Malany holds a Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of Iowa and completed postdoctoral training in pharmacology at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Malany started her career in the biotechnology industry in San Diego and helped advance preclinical drugs to treat cardiovascular and metabolic disease. She moved to Florida in 2011 to lead pharmacology drug discovery efforts at the Sanford Burnham Prebys Medical Discovery Institute Chemical Genomics Center. This happened to be the same year that the shuttle program ended, and Dr. Malany became interested in space medicine after networking with administrators at Space Florida and the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS). She founded Micro-gRx in 2015 after receiving seed funding from Space Florida to develop a human muscle cell system called a lab-on-a-chip that launched to the International Space Station (ISS) National Laboratory in 2018. The same year, she transitioned to the College of Pharmacy at the University of Florida, where she has advanced an engineered human muscle-on-a-chip that tests the feasibility of microfluidic devices embedded with three-dimensional muscle-hydrogel bundles connected to electrodes to track muscle function in the presence and absence of clinical drug candidates for the treatment of age-related muscle atrophy. These tissue chips were launched to the ISS National Lab in Dec. 2020 to investigate the effects of microgravity on muscle biology and muscle-wasting disease. Dr. Malany was recently interviewed by Authority Magazine, and was a guest on “Houston, We Have a Podcast.”