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Sometime this week, a 1-metre-wide capsule will fall from the sky and land in the South Australian desert carrying a cargo of drugs.
Since launching on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on 14 January, a reactor on board the capsule has been manufacturing an undisclosed, proprietary pharmaceutical compound.
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Varda, the US-based company that built the capsule, is aiming to show that producing drugs in low Earth orbit is cost-effective and offers advantages over manufacturing them on the ground.
Producing pharmaceuticals in space isn鈥檛 a gimmick, says at the University of Adelaide in Australia, who is not connected with Varda. 鈥淭here鈥檚 definitely a value in it because we can do things in space which we simply cannot do on Earth.鈥�
鈥淲ithout gravity and convection, you can control experimental and manufacturing conditions much better and, long story short, we can, under those conditions, better define what crystals will be formed, and we will get crystals with a better shape, definition and purity.鈥�
Varda is only the third commercial business to have successfully built and tested a re-entry vehicle after SpaceX and Boeing, says , the firm鈥檚 chief science officer.
Its first mission, launched in June 2023, saw the of the HIV drug ritonavir in a fully automated, uncrewed vehicle that spent eight months in orbit before landing in Utah.
The company鈥檚 second capsule, W-2, is set to land in the Koonibba Test Range, a 41,000-square-kilometre site at the western edge of South Australia 鈥� one of the most remote parts of the continent.
鈥淚t鈥檚 the Australian outback,鈥� says Radocea. 鈥淚t鈥檚 huge, but we are targeting a comparatively small ellipse inside the Koonibba Test Range, and our capsule gets positioned by its satellite to re-enter directly into that ellipse. That鈥檚 all coordinated and tracked with the safety regulators in both the US and Australia.鈥�
W-2 is making small amounts of drugs, but Varda plans to scale up once they have demonstrated that the concept is viable. 鈥淭his current spacecraft isn鈥檛 the vehicle for treating millions of patients, but it is the appropriate vehicle for the drug development activities that are necessary to get to commercialisation,鈥� says Radocea.
鈥淚t can be grams to hundreds of grams for the early clinical stages, and it might be a couple of kilograms for the later clinical stages of drug development. So you don鈥檛 necessarily need the very large vehicle right away.鈥�
Also, crystals grown in microgravity can be used as a template for generating that same structure back on Earth. 鈥淚t鈥檚 a little bit like the sourdough starter model,鈥� says Radocea. 鈥淚t鈥檚 not necessarily that you always have to go do it in space. There can be cases where you have a starter material that you bring back from space, but then you scale it up with traditional means.鈥�
