TechCrunch reports that “Varda Space Industries has closed on a huge funding round just weeks after the first drug-making capsule returned from orbit.”
The article notes that Varda has raised $145 million to date, and that the $90 million in new Series B funding “marks a turning point for the company, which has now expanded from its first demonstration mission to a series of regular missions.” We are currently preparing to expand the scale of our business.” It carries customer payloads, Varda founder Delian Asparouhov told TechCrunch.
El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by Aspalhoff, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bluey, a spacecraft engineer who honed his skills at SpaceX. The two had the audacious goal of eventually commercializing their until recently promising but small-scale research into the effects of microgravity on pharmaceutical crystals… Researchers have been conducting protein crystallization experiments on the International Space Station and in space for decades before that. ,space shuttle. However, the business case for scaling up this research has not materialized to date.
Varda is now possible in part because of SpaceX's availability of regular low-cost rideshare launches and Rocket Lab's innovations in satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the startup has made great strides in its own right, as the success of its first mission demonstrated. Their reentry capsule appeared to work perfectly, and their experiment with reformulating the HIV drug ritonavir also went smoothly. Say. Varda also began publishing internal research and development results, including scientific papers on supergravity (as opposed to microgravity) crystallization platforms. Varda developed the platform as a type of screening method for drugs before sending them into space. [The paper is titled “Gravity as a Knob for Tuning Particle Size Distributions of Small Molecules.”] This is an entirely new field of research that harnesses the ability to truly unleash gravity as a variable in scientific experiments. “Over time, we will be able to generate datasets between both supergravity and microgravity, and we will begin to see correlations,” he said.
In a recent podcast appearance, he said that All-In's initial mission costs about $12 million, but by Mission 4 it's down to $5-6 million, and by Mission 10 it's less than $2.5 million. I said it would be. ) Larger capsules will also be developed in the long term. However, this too he will not until the period of 2027. Asparoukhov also acknowledged that pharmaceuticals will be Varda's sole focus for the next 10 to 20 years (or more), based on the company's belief that pharmaceuticals create more economic value compared to other materials. Ta. Much of this comes down to the fact that there are important classes of medicines that require only a “seed” of materials that can only be produced in a microgravity environment, while the rest of the drug formulation can be completed on Earth. .
The company is also aiming to improve the throughput of its on-board pharmaceutical reactors. In the first mission he transported only one drug protein, but in the future the company wants to process multiple drug products that can be carried out in different processing regimes. In the future, other missions may carry larger reactors for pharmaceuticals that require more than “seed” crystals, and the profile of those missions could move closer to something like mass production. It will be.
According to the article, Varda already has contracts with “several” biotech companies — and Varda's next manufacturing mission is “scheduled to begin later this year.”
