Pharmaceutical scientists come up against a hard limitation here on Earth: gravity. Varda Space wants to change that.
The company has raised a massive new round to turn space into the “ultimate high ground” for the production of critical pharmaceutical components that can be brought back to Earth and used to make finished drugs.
The company’s $187 million Series C funding round announced Thursday will be used to build out a new laboratory facility that could transform Varda’s orbital manufacturing process into a lucrative intellectual property-generating machine.
The 10,000-square-foot-lab space in El Segundo, California will enable Varda pharmaceutical scientists to determine which biologics, like proteins and antibodies, are the most promising candidates for space-based crystallization. They will essentially perform “the upfront work” to determine which assets are good candidates for an orbital mission, and what conditions to put them through in space, Varda co-founder Delian Asparouhov explained in an interview with TechCrunch.
“The company can go and do process engineering to understand at what temperatures and what conditions do the biologics crystallize ahead of time, so that when we get up in orbit the bioreactor knows what to do,” Asparouhov said.
Varda is in conversation with leading pharmaceutical manufacturers that are struggling with particular problems, like crystallizing a particular ingredient, or issues with drug purity or shelf-life stability. The company’s aim is to use its lab and orbital spacecraft to solve those problems, and in the process generate IP that can be patented and licensed to drugmakers.
The lab will provide opportunity for the company to generate intellectual property that could prove valuable further down in the drug production life cycle. Asparouhov said he expec …