Microgravity enables differentiated drug products
Processing in a microgravity environment dramatically alters buoyancy, natural convection, sedimentation, and phase separation—driving significant differences in transport-driven phenomena.
Processing in a microgravity environment dramatically alters buoyancy, natural convection, sedimentation, and phase separation—driving significant differences in transport-driven phenomena.
Processing materials in microgravity (µg), or the near-weightless conditions found in space, offers a unique environment not available through terrestrial processing. These benefits primarily stem from the lack of convection and sedimentation.
These effects are “locked” into the material, typically through material crystallization, before being brought back to Earth.
While gravitational forces do not directly impact thermodynamic properties of systems, they do significantly impact kinetic and hydrodynamic processes. Microgravity suppresses convection and sedimentation, resulting in more uniform supersaturation, as well as diffusion-driven transport. The resulting environment enables crystallization outcomes that lead to improvements in bioavailability, enhanced physicochemical properties, differentiated intellectual property, and new routes of administration — all realized by conducting research in microgravity.
Varda conducts process characterization on custom and traditional crystallization hardware for small-volume screening (Crystal16, Technobis) as well as larger-scale automated reactors (EasyMax, Mettler Toledo) with complimentary process analytical technologies. Varda offers:
At Varda, we couple our spacecraft, process equipment, and manufacturing capabilities with terrestrial hypergravity testing to unlock commercial opportunities for in-space production.
Crystallization experiments are conducted with custom or commercial off-the-shelf hardware compatible with Varda’s hypergravity platform to assess drug properties and performance across a range of gravity levels. Varda’s hypergravity platform allows us to:
Varda’s capsule allows process development in orbit with return of materials to Earth. To conduct testing in orbit, Varda handles each step for our customers:
Once our customers’ sample returns to Earth, they can fully characterize all materials produced and recovered from microgravity studies with Varda or through external strategic partners.
Varda and its partners are equipped with a full suite of analytical testing capabilities:
Varda has developed hypergravity screening methodologies that can, in a cost-effective way, measure the role of gravity in affecting drug product performance. Varda’s platform allows us to rapidly screen a broad set of potential drug candidates for space, inclusive of both small molecule and biologic modalities. Initial screening allows Varda to fly therapies that point toward the most promising microgravity candidates.
Varda’s hypergravity crystallization platform demonstrated the effect of gravity on nucleation and growth kinetics for a seeded cooling crystallization of L-histidine. The studies illustrate the ability to use gravity as a variable to influence particle size distributions of small molecule therapeutics.
Please contact pharma@varda.com for microgravity crystallization information.