BioOrbit: record seed round for in‑space drug manufacturing

A large share of the world’s top‑selling medicines are administered intravenously in clinical settings. This ties patients to repeated hospital or infusion‑centre visits for weeks or months. According to BioOrbit’s own data, these IV‑based regimens account for a large share of current high‑value biologics, highlighting the cost and burden of clinic‑based delivery. The company wants to change that by using the microgravity environment of low‑Earth orbit to reformulate these complex biologics as subcutaneous, self‑injectable therapies. This could help shift cancer‑ and chronic‑disease care from the hospital to the home.

The firm’s core idea is that microgravity can guide protein‑drug crystals to form more precisely and reproducibly than they do on Earth, potentially yielding more stable, higher‑quality biologics suitable for pen‑ or auto‑injector delivery. BioOrbit is now building custom hardware and mission architecture to scale crystallisation of biologic drugs in orbit and bring the finished product safely back to Earth under pharmaceutical‑grade conditions. The UK Space Agency has already awarded BioOrbit an £250k contract under the “PHARM” study to design an end‑to‑end, regulatory‑compliant mission for in‑orbit drug manufacturing, signalling that regulators and public funders are at least willing to test the concept.

The £9.8m seed round BioOrbit has just raised puts it among the better‑funded early‑stage players in the space‑life‑science niche, even though the company is still years away from any commercial‑scale manufacturing in orbit. The capital will accelerate the London-based company’s transition to industrial deployment, converting microgravity breakthroughs into contracted pharmaceutical programmes. “This is a huge step-change in drug delivery and economics,” commented Katie King, Founder and CEO of BioOrbit. “Our focus from day one has been scale, moving beyond experimental results to industrial production, where no existing solution has succeeded. We are now enabling the creation of more perfect, highly ordered crystals that unlock drug formulations not achievable on Earth. It is a paradigm shift for cancer therapies and for the pharmaceutical industry at large, as we’re enabling manufacturing at scale in orbit for the first time.”

Lord David Willetts, Chair of the UK Space Agency, added: “Manufacturing in space is one of the big new opportunities opening up as launch costs fall and robotics advance. BioOrbit is an exciting British start-up well-placed to take advantage of this – with extraordinary innovations in the efficacy of cancer immunotherapies.”

The UK is active on several fronts when it comes to space‑based biotechnology. Just last year, a team led by Imperial College London launched a miniature lab into Earth orbit to test the production of edible proteins in space using yeast‑based biotech, underlining that the nation’s ambitions extend beyond traditional rockets to the machines that make food and medicine off‑planet.