A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial

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.