BioOrbit

BioOrbit is trying to make antibody drugs crystallise in orbit. In microgravity there is no convection or sedimentation, so protein crystals grow uniformly, and a uniform crystalline suspension can be concentrated far enough to turn an intravenous hospital infusion into an injection a patient gives themselves at home. The hardware is BOX, an autonomous crystallisation unit small enough to sit on a desk, with a smaller version now flying and free-flying factory satellites as the long-term picture.

Katie King, a Cambridge nanomedicine PhD with NASA and AstraZeneca behind her, founded the company on science that is genuinely old: protein crystals have grown better in microgravity for decades of ISS experiments. The company's contribution is meant to be scale and automation, batch production rather than one-off science. The UK's medicines regulator built the world's first framework for space-manufactured drugs in March 2026, with BioOrbit at the table.

The first attempt ended in the ocean. BioOrbit's inaugural payload flew on The Exploration Company's capsule in June 2025 and was lost with it when the parachutes failed. A successor unit reached the ISS in 2026 and its results are not yet public. The harder questions stack up behind the chemistry: production needs routine return from orbit, which barely exists as a service; nobody has demonstrated batch consistency or regulator-accepted release testing for a space-made drug substance; and on Earth, enzyme-based reformulation keeps converting the same infusions to injections without leaving the ground.