A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial

Varda Space Industries, a startup that’s been pitching its ability to perform drug experiments in space, says it has signed up the pharmaceutical company United Therapeutics in what may be remembered as a notable step toward in-orbit manufacturing.

The idea of building things in outer space for use on Earth has so far been explored mostly on board the International Space Station, and only in small-scale experiments backed by governments.

But Varda, based in El Segundo, California, is now telling drug companies it has a practical, and repeatable, way to produce novel molecules in microgravity. 

“This is the first commercial path to products made in space,” says Michael Reilly, Varda’s chief strategy officer.

The scientific idea is that chemical mixtures have different properties under weightless conditions. For instance, water will hang together in a wiggly sphere, since without gravity, surface tension is the strongest force present.

The plan is to launch versions of United Therapeutics’ drugs into orbit, where they can be allowed to form solid crystals. The hope is that in microgravity, they’ll take on atomic arrangements not seen on Earth, possibly leading to new versions with improved stability or other valuable properties.

United is led by CEO Martine Rothblatt, who worked on early telecommunications satellites. Since then, she’s built a multibillion-dollar health franchise with a succession of drugs to treat a lung disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension, which her daughter suffers from, and a subsidiary developing genetically modified pigs as a source of organs for transplantation.

Rothblatt says space could be the next step if orbital conditions permit United to identify “even more amazing” versions of its drugs.

Space to reformulate

Pharmaceutical companies often try to keep their blockbuster franchises alive by creating improved versions of drugs or reformulating them—for example, making the switch from a pill to an inhaled version, as United has done with some of its products. Doing so can keep imitators at bay and create extra decades of patent protection.

Assisting drugmakers are specialist companies, such as Halozyme and MannKind, that earn profits by helping to reformulate other companies’ drugs, often taking a royalty on future sales.

That’s the business Varda has been trying to break into—by using excursions into space instead of nebulizers, patches, or nanoparticles. The company was formed in 2021 by Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, along with Will Bruey, a former avionics engineer with Elon Musk’s SpaceX who is now Varda’s CEO.

The pair’s bet is that space manufacturing will become viable once rocket launches become frequent enough—and cheap enough—to support a business model in which raw materials are sent into orbit, processed, and then returned to Earth in a new form.

And that’s starting to happen. To get into space, Varda has been purchasing rides from SpaceX—which now launches a rocket every two or three days, usually a reusable Falcon 9. 

Those rockets have a nose cone, or payload fairing, about the size of a moving truck that gets filled with satellites or instruments, which are then released into orbit.

Starting in 2023, Varda began sending up small satellites that have a boulder-size capsule attached. The capsule contains equipment to carry out experiments, and it can detach and fall back to Earth, entering the atmosphere at a speed of around Mach 25 before slowing via air resistance and eventually drifting to land with a parachute. (Varda lands its craft in the Australian outback.)

That speedy reentry has also drawn interest from the US military, including the Air Force, which has paid Varda to fly instruments and take measurements relevant to hypersonic missile technology. Of the six craft Varda has paid to put into orbit so far, half have been dedicated to military research and half carried drug-related demonstrations. 

At Varda, such “dual use” of technology is accepted as part of being in the space business, which remains reliant on government support. The company’s founders say Varda may be the only company that employs hypersonic engineers and pharmaceutical chemists under the same roof.

COURTESY VARDA

Launching industries

Actual space manufacturing still remains mostly an aspirational project. In 2021, Jeff Bezos, after his first trip aloft in a rocket, suggested that polluting industries should be moved beyond the atmosphere. “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is,” he told MSNBC.

Weight is the big obstacle to such dreams. It still costs around $7,000 to launch a single kilogram of payload into orbit, which makes it impractical to, say, send cotton into space to be dyed there, or even to launch the acids and solvents needed to make a semiconductor chip.

But drugs may be among the few exceptions to this economic rule, since pound for pound, they can be as valuable as rare radioactive isotopes and fine-cut diamonds.

For instance, just one kilogram of the weight-loss drug Ozempic is worth more than $100 million at retail. (The reason your Ozempic bill is only $1,000 a month is that minute quantities of the active ingredient are present in the shots.)

That’s why Varda thinks it may eventually be able to manufacture drugs in orbit. However, its effort with United is more of a flying experiment to learn whether the company’s lung medicines will crystallize differently in microgravity.  

The terms of the deal between Varda and United aren’t public, and the companies haven’t said which specific drugs the collaboration will study. But Rothblatt did confirm that United is paying Varda to help it identify new crystal forms of its drugs (also called polymorphs), which it hopes could have improved properties.

“One has to do the experiment to find out if that is so. The first part of the experiment is to see what polymorphs of these molecules can be made without the influence of gravity,” she says. “Then, once we have those polymorphs, we will test them.” 

There is good evidence that crystals form differently in space. For instance, in 2017 the pharmaceutical giant Merck sent samples of its cancer immunotherapy drug Keytruda to the International Space Station, where it was found to form crystals of a single size. On Earth, the drug tended to form two different sizes at once.

That experiment offered clues for how to formulate the drug as a shot instead of administering it intravenously. Still, when Merck introduced a Keytruda injection last year, it ended up using a different approach. That means there’s still no straight-line connection between orbital discoveries and any drug here on Earth. Actual space factories are another step further from reality. 

“We’ve been learning from space for years, but I can’t name anything manufactured in space, brought down to Earth, and sold,” says Reilly. “So that is a first—or it will be a first.”

Reilly says that Varda anticipates launching United Therapeutics’ drugs into orbit sometime early next year.