A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial

A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial United Therapeutics is collaborating with Varda Space Industries to test pharmaceuticals in outer space. 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 the company’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…