A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial
A plan to make drugs in orbit is going commercial
太空制药计划迈向商业化
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Varda Space Industries, a startup that’s been pitching its ability to perform drug experiments in space, says it has signed up the pharmaceutical company United Therapeutics in what may be remembered as a notable step toward in-orbit manufacturing. 执行摘要 Varda Space Industries 是一家一直致力于推广其太空药物实验能力的初创公司。该公司近日宣布已与联合治疗公司（United Therapeutics）签署协议，这可能被视为迈向轨道制造的重要一步。
The idea of building things in outer space for use on Earth has so far been explored mostly on board the International Space Station, and only in small-scale experiments backed by governments. But Varda, based in El Segundo, California, is now telling drug companies it has a practical, and repeatable, way to produce novel molecules in microgravity. “This is the first commercial path to products made in space,” says Michael Reilly, Varda’s chief strategy officer. 在太空中制造产品供地球使用这一构想，此前大多仅在国际空间站上进行过探索，且仅限于政府支持的小规模实验。但总部位于加利福尼亚州埃尔塞贡多的 Varda 公司现在向制药企业表示，他们拥有一种实用且可重复的方法，可以在微重力环境下生产新型分子。Varda 首席战略官 Michael Reilly 表示：“这是通往太空制造产品的首条商业路径。”
The scientific idea is that chemical mixtures have different properties under weightless conditions. For instance, water will hang together in a wiggly sphere, since without gravity, surface tension is the strongest force present. The plan is to launch versions of United Therapeutics’ drugs into orbit, where they can be allowed to form solid crystals. The hope is that in microgravity, they’ll take on atomic arrangements not seen on Earth, possibly leading to new versions with improved stability or other valuable properties. 其科学原理在于，化学混合物在失重条件下具有不同的特性。例如，水会聚集成一个晃动的球体，因为在没有重力的情况下，表面张力是存在的最强作用力。该计划是将联合治疗公司的药物版本送入轨道，让它们在轨道上形成固体晶体。人们希望在微重力环境下，这些药物能呈现出地球上未见的原子排列方式，从而可能产生稳定性更高或具有其他宝贵特性的新版本药物。
United is led by CEO Martine Rothblatt, who worked on early telecommunications satellites. Since then, she’s built a multibillion-dollar health franchise with a succession of drugs to treat a lung disease called pulmonary arterial hypertension, which her daughter suffers from, and a subsidiary developing genetically modified pigs as a source of organs for transplantation. Rothblatt says space could be the next step if orbital conditions permit United to identify “even more amazing” versions of its drugs. 联合治疗公司由首席执行官 Martine Rothblatt 领导，她曾从事早期通信卫星的工作。此后，她建立了一个价值数十亿美元的健康产业，推出了一系列治疗肺动脉高压（她女儿所患的一种肺部疾病）的药物，并拥有一家开发转基因猪作为移植器官来源的子公司。Rothblatt 表示，如果轨道条件能让公司发现“更令人惊叹”的药物版本，那么太空可能就是下一步的发展方向。
Space to reformulate 太空重构药物
Pharmaceutical companies often try to keep their blockbuster franchises alive by creating improved versions of drugs or reformulating them—for example, making the switch from a pill to an inhaled version, as United has done with some of its products. Doing so can keep imitators at bay and create extra decades of patent protection. Assisting drugmakers are specialist companies, such as Halozyme and MannKind, that earn profits by helping to reformulate other companies’ drugs, often taking a royalty on future sales. That’s the business Varda has been trying to break into—by using excursions into space instead of nebulizers, patches, or nanoparticles. 制药公司通常试图通过创造改进版药物或重新配方来维持其重磅产品的生命力——例如，像联合治疗公司对其部分产品所做的那样，将药丸改为吸入式。这样做可以抵御仿制药竞争，并获得额外的数十年专利保护。Halozyme 和 MannKind 等专业公司通过帮助其他公司重新配制药物来获利，通常会从未来的销售额中抽取版税。这正是 Varda 试图切入的领域——通过太空之旅，而不是雾化器、贴片或纳米颗粒来实现这一目标。
The company was formed in 2021 by Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, along with Will Bruey, a former avionics engineer with Elon Musk’s SpaceX who is now Varda’s CEO. The pair’s bet is that space manufacturing will become viable once rocket launches become frequent enough—and cheap enough—to support a business model in which raw materials are sent into orbit, processed, and then returned to Earth in a new form. And that’s starting to happen. 该公司由彼得·蒂尔（Peter Thiel）旗下 Founders Fund 的合伙人 Delian Asparouhov 与前 SpaceX 航空电子工程师、现任 Varda 首席执行官 Will Bruey 于 2021 年共同创立。两人押注，一旦火箭发射变得足够频繁且成本足够低廉，太空制造将变得可行，从而支持一种将原材料送入轨道、加工后再以新形式返回地球的商业模式。而这一切正在发生。
To get into space, Varda has been purchasing rides from SpaceX—which now launches a rocket every two or three days, usually a reusable Falcon 9. Those rockets have a nose cone, or payload fairing, about the size of a moving truck that gets filled with satellites or instruments, which are then released into orbit. Starting in 2023, Varda began sending up small satellites that have a boulder-size capsule attached. The capsule contains equipment to carry out experiments, and it can detach and fall back to Earth, entering the atmosphere at a speed of around Mach 25 before slowing via air resistance and eventually drifting to land with a parachute. (Varda lands its craft in the Australian outback.) 为了进入太空，Varda 一直在购买 SpaceX 的发射服务——SpaceX 现在每两三天就发射一枚火箭，通常是可重复使用的猎鹰 9 号。这些火箭有一个大约搬家卡车大小的鼻锥（或称有效载荷整流罩），里面装满了卫星或仪器，然后被释放到轨道上。从 2023 年开始，Varda 开始发射附带巨石大小太空舱的小型卫星。该太空舱内装有进行实验的设备，可以分离并返回地球，以约 25 马赫的速度进入大气层，随后通过空气阻力减速，最终利用降落伞着陆。（Varda 将其飞行器降落在澳大利亚内陆地区。）
That speedy reentry has also drawn interest from the US military, including the Air Force, which has paid Varda to fly instruments and take measurements relevant to hypersonic missile technology. Of the six craft Varda has paid to put into orbit so far, half have been dedicated to military research and half carried drug-related demonstrations. At Varda, such “dual use” of technology is accepted as part of being in the space business, which remains reliant on government support. The company’s founders say Varda may be the only company that employs hypersonic engineers and pharmaceutical chemists under the same roof. 这种高速再入技术也引起了美国军方（包括空军）的兴趣，他们已向 Varda 付费，用于搭载仪器并进行与高超音速导弹技术相关的测量。在 Varda 迄今为止已付费送入轨道的六个飞行器中，一半用于军事研究，另一半则进行了药物相关演示。在 Varda，这种技术的“军民两用”被视为太空业务的一部分，该行业目前仍依赖政府支持。公司创始人表示，Varda 可能是唯一一家在同一屋檐下同时雇佣高超音速工程师和药物化学家的公司。
At Varda’s headquarters, drug samples are loaded into a spinning arm that creates extra-high g-forces. While that’s the opposite of microgravity, increased weight can provide clues into whether a drug will act differently under new conditions. 在 Varda 总部，药物样本被装入一个旋转臂中，以产生超高重力。虽然这与微重力相反，但增加的重量可以为药物在不同条件下是否会有不同表现提供线索。
Launching industries 启动产业
Actual space manufacturing still remains mostly an aspirational project. In 2021, Jeff Bezos, after his first trip aloft in a rocket, suggested that polluting industries should be moved beyond the atmosphere. “We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is,” he told MSNBC. 真正的太空制造目前仍大多处于愿景阶段。2021 年，杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）在首次火箭飞行后建议，应将污染工业转移到大气层之外。他告诉 MSNBC：“我们需要将所有重工业、所有污染工业转移到太空中，让地球保持它作为一颗美丽星球的本来面貌。”
Weight is the big obstacle to such dreams. It still costs around $7,000 to launch a single kilogram of payload into orbit, which makes it impractical to, say, send cotton into space to be dyed there, or even to launch the acids and solvents needed to make a semiconductor chip. But drugs may be among the few exceptions to this economic rule, since pound for pound, they can be as valuable as rare radioactive isotopes and fine-cut diamonds. For instance, just one kilogram of the weight-loss drug Ozempic is worth more than $100 million at retail. (The reason your Ozempic bill is only $1,000 a month is that minute quantities of the active ingredient are present in the shots.) That’s why Varda thinks it may eventually be able to manufacture drugs in orbit. 重量是实现这些梦想的最大障碍。目前将一公斤有效载荷送入轨道的成本仍需约 7,000 美元，这使得将棉花送入太空染色，甚至发射制造半导体芯片所需的酸和溶剂变得不切实际。但药物可能是这一经济规律的少数例外，因为按重量计算，它们的价值堪比稀有放射性同位素和精切钻石。例如，仅一公斤减肥药 Ozempic 的零售价值就超过 1 亿美元。（你每月支付 1,000 美元的 Ozempic 账单，是因为注射剂中仅含有微量的活性成分。）这就是为什么 Varda 认为它最终能够在轨道上制造药物。
However, its effort with United is more of a flying experiment to learn whether the company’s lung medicines will crystallize differently in microgravity. The terms of the deal between Varda and United aren’t public, and the companies haven’t said which specific drugs the collaboration will study. But Rothblatt did confirm that United is 然而，它与联合治疗公司的合作更像是一次飞行实验，旨在了解该公司的肺部药物在微重力下是否会以不同的方式结晶。Varda 与联合治疗公司之间的交易条款尚未公开，两家公司也未透露此次合作将研究哪些具体药物。但 Rothblatt 确实证实，联合治疗公司正在……