{"id":10055,"date":"2026-05-13T11:17:27","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T11:17:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=10055"},"modified":"2026-05-13T11:17:27","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T11:17:27","slug":"a-plan-to-make-drugs-in-orbit-is-going-commercial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news678.top\/?p=10055","title":{"rendered":"A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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\u00a0minute quantities of the active ingredient are present in the shots.)<\/p>\n
That\u2019s 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\u2019s lung medicines will crystallize differently in microgravity.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The terms of the deal between Varda and United aren\u2019t public, and the companies haven\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne 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,\u201d she says. \u201cThen, once we have those polymorphs, we will test them.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\u00a0 a single size. On Earth, the drug tended to form two different sizes at once.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s still no straight-line connection between orbital discoveries and any drug here on Earth.\u00a0 Actual space factories are another step further from reality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been learning from space for years, but I can\u2019t name anything manufactured in space, brought down to Earth, and sold,\u201d says Reilly. \u201cSo that is a first\u2014or it will be a first.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reilly says that Varda anticipates launching United Therapeutics\u2019 drugs into orbit sometime early next year.\u00a0