For many cancer patients, receiving treatment still means going to hospital, often spending hours receiving drugs intravenously before returning home. Founder Katie King thinks that this process could change, with part of the answer waiting for us, hundreds of kilometers above Earth.

Her company, BioOrbit, is developing pharmaceutical crystal manufacturing technology designed to operate in microgravity. Its goal is not to discover entirely new cancer medicines, but to change the physical form of existing drugs.

By crystallising pharmaceutical compounds in space, BioOrbit wants to create highly concentrated formulations that could potentially turn medicines currently administered intravenously into injections patients can give themselves at home.

“Just like how diabetics inject themselves with insulin, we want to bring that same paradigm to the treatment of cancer,” Katie explains.

When gravity is removed from the manufacturing process, matter acts in new and exciting ways. For BioOrbit, this means they can make protein crystals with features that are hard to achieve on Earth. This could give pharmaceutical companies more control over how medicines are given and released in the body.

Katie sees this as part of something much bigger: a future where space isn’t just somewhere we explore, but somewhere we make things too. Read the full interview to discover what that could mean for the future of medicine.

About BioOrbit

BioOrbit is a biotech company developing the hardware for the large-scale crystallization of protein drugs. Their grand aim is to develop a regulated in-space drug production facility and become a core part of the pharmaceutical supply chain within the next 10 years.

Defying gravity

Katie’s route into space manufacturing began with medicine. She completed a PhD in nanomedicine, studying how controlling matter at extremely small scales can influence drug delivery and how the body responds to different formulations.

Microgravity was not part of her PhD, but what she learned about particles, formulations, and drug delivery later became key to BioOrbit.

Today, the challenge BioOrbit is tackling lies in the concentration of drugs. Many cancer treatments, require highdoses which must be concentrated enough to fit into a small injection.. At those high concentrations, liquid medicines become too thick to inject.

The key could lie in crystallisation. Crystals can pack more drug into a smaller volume without increasing the viscosity. The characteristics of crystals can also influence how a medicine behaves in the body. The size of the particles, for example, can change the rate at which a drug is released.

On Earth, gravity disturbs how crystals form, producing uneven results that are hard to replicate. BioOrbit is leveraging microgravity to produce more uniform, consistent crystals. Rather than seeing gravity as something fixed, Katie treats it as another factor they can adjust.

“On Earth we live with 1G, and that affects everything we do and how we’ve evolved,” she says. Take gravity away, and basic things start to behave differently. BioOrbit wants to use that difference.

“We’re controlling that gravity variable.”

A pharmaceutical factory the size of a microwave

When people hear about making medicines in space, they might picture huge factories circling the planet. But what BioOrbit is building actually looks quite different.

“The biggest misconception about production in space is that you need a lot of space to do this,” Katie says.

Traditional drug factories are generally quite large. But BioOrbit is not planning to move the whole process into space. The final drug product can still be made in the usual way, here on Earth. BioOrbit focuses on one step: sending the protein into microgravity, crystallizing it, and then bringing it back.

In fact, its manufacturing unit that gets sent to space is roughly the size of a microwave. Sending things into orbit is still costly and complicated. By using small units, BioOrbit doesn’t need to build a whole factory in space.

Until recently, even this small-scale production would have been difficult to scale. Companies doing microgravity experiments have mostly relied on using the International Space Station. Now, new commercial space stations are being built, more re-entry vehicles are available, and launch options are growing.

For BioOrbit, these new developments could turn experiments into a real industrial process.

“The new space infrastructure means that scale is on the horizon and is now possible, in a way that it never was before,” Katie says.

“Now is the time to build this.”

Finding the right investors

Working at the crossroads of biotech and space brings another challenge: getting people to believe that something which sounds like science fiction can become a real business. This is something that Katie experienced first-hand when she started fundraising.

The challenge was not only explaining what BioOrbit does now, she also had to describe the future infrastructure she expects to support it.

“A lot of it was me painting the picture of: this is where it’s headed,” she says. “Not where we are right now, but where it’s headed, and this is how we fit in with that future.”

Katie calls the changes in the space industry an “iPhone moment.” Different technologies and infrastructure are coming together at the same time, opening up new possibilities that were not practical before.

Some investors immediately understood the argument. Others had less conviction about how quickly the industry would develop.

“If the investors got it, they got it,” Katie says. “This isn’t as sci-fi as it first sounds.”

For a frontier technology company, it has been especially important to find investors who are aligned and who ‘get it’. They have to develop conviction not only around the company, but around where the industry as a whole is heading.

“It’s about finding the investors that see what you see and back you through it.”

Getting medicine into orbit

BioOrbit has already taken an important step towards proving its model.

For its most recent mission, the company needed to get its technology onto the International Space Station. It worked with a platform provider that could host its equipment and secure space aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo resupply mission.

At the moment, it makes sense for BioOrbit to let other companies handle transportation, especially as more than 20 companies are working on re-entry, she says. She thinks of them as the future couriers of the space economy, competing on price and service while companies like BioOrbit focus on what they need to build.

“They’re going to have to compete on price points to get the customers,” she says. “So I’m happy to leave them to it.”

BioOrbit might rethink this if transportation gets too expensive or slow. But building their own system now would cost a lot and solve a problem that many other companies are already working on.

The more immediate challenge is designing pharmaceutical manufacturing equipment that works reliably in microgravity.

To do this, the BioOrbit team has to go back to basics. A rocket is just one part of the logistics and launches have to be scheduled well ahead of time. Equipment needs to meet extra safety rules. Pumps and fluids act differently because gravity is not pulling things down. Each constraint creates an entirely new engineering question.

“It’s all solvable. You just have to ask a lot of different questions.”

From a bedroom to BioOrbit

Katie did not have a plan for BioOrbit when she finished her PhD. But while she was studying nanomedicine, something else caught her attention: SpaceX was demonstrating rocket reusability.

“I remember seeing that and thinking, wow, this is the start of a new era for the industry,” she recalls.

Her response was simple: finish the PhD, then find a way in.

Katie defended her doctorate in early 2022. In May 2023, she quit her job and started BioOrbit. She didn’t have a large team or major funding round waiting for her. For about a year, she worked from her bedroom and lived off her savings while learning about both startups and the commercial space industry.

When BioOrbit secured its first funding in late summer 2024, she could finally start hiring.

Moving from academia to starting a business meant Katie had to think differently. A PhD values deep knowledge, but starting a company often means facing things you do not know, this is all part of the job.

For a company working in pharmaceuticals, engineering, and space, each stage brings its own technical challenges, people, and language. No founder can know everything from the start. What really matters is how fast they can learn.

“It’s not about having the answers. It’s about learning as quickly as you possibly can.”

What comes after the first flight

BioOrbit’s ambitions extend well beyond proving that its technology can work once in orbit. The company has already seen promising results from its recent launch with indepth crystal analysis underway in the lab. Next, they will test a range of other drugs to map out the full potential of the platform.

Katie says the technology could be used for many drugs, not just one, but cancer is a good place to start because of the high doses that are needed.

If crystallizing drugs in microgravity can make them easier to administer at home, it could mean that fewer patients have to spend time in hospital.

In the next few years, Katie hopes to turn this idea into a business just like any other. This will mean flying to space several times, making deals with drug companies, and creating a steady flow of pharmaceutical partners’ drugs through BioOrbit’s system.

Eventually, she wants the company to have a permanent presence in space. The aim is to make producing medicines in microgravity a normal part of drug production.

“Success would look like having a steady pipeline of pharma drugs coming through our system.”

Space as a laboratory for Earth

Cancer treatment is just one example of what Katie thinks microgravity could make possible. She is especially excited about the potential for making organoids.

Organoids are tiny versions of organs used to study disease and test drugs. Since they act more like real human organs than some lab models, better organoids could help predict how medicines will work in clinical trials.

Right now, companies are exploring applications ranging from artificial retinas to new approaches to drug discovery. For Katie, these examples show that we still have a lot to learn about what microgravity could do for business.

Historically, access to space has been the limiting factor. When it is so expensive to work in orbit, only a few ideas get tested. If access grows, costs drop, and infrastructure improves, which means that many more scientists and entrepreneurs can try new things and unexpected applications will emerge.

In other words, the value of the space economy may come not just from what we do in space, but from what we can bring back.

“I don’t think we’ve really touched the surface yet.”

Building a crew, not just a company

Katie’s ambitions have always extended beyond medicine. As a child, she wanted to become an astronaut. She still does.

Alongside her scientific career, she spent four years in officer cadet military training. She later began training as a private pilot, although running BioOrbit has left her with far less time to fly.

Those experiences have influenced the type of company she wants to build. When she talks about leadership, she comes back to cohesion, camaraderie, and empowerment. She wants to maintain high standards, but she also wants people to feel they are pursuing something together.

She wants her team to operate like an astronaut crew. Teams of astronauts mix the hard work and discipline of military training with scientific goals. Team members need to understand each other, communicate under stress, and work well even when tired or uncomfortable.

Katie experienced something similar during military training. “When a team is working in sync with each other, it feels so good to be part of that,” she says.

For her, excellence and camaraderie are not opposing ideas. In her eyes, the bar can be high precisely because the team is committed to helping one another reach it.

“There’s a high bar, but we’re all in it together.”

Quickfire round

What’s one tool you can’t live without?

“A kettle. I need my tea. I can't function without it.”

Which founders or startups do you admire?

“Hélène Huby at The Exploration Company and Philip Johnston at Starcloud. I love seeing people go after ideas that might sound crazy at first and then show what is possible.”

What’s one piece of advice that has stuck with you?

“I met Canadian astronaut Jenni Gibbons while she was going through astronaut selection and her advice stayed with me. She spoke about reaching a point where she doubted whether she could continue, only to realize she was effectively removing herself from the competition. She said, “Don’t take yourself out of the race.” It’s about recognizing when your brain isn’t helping you, and not letting self-doubt stop you from trying.

What’s your recharge ritual?

“In a perfect world, I would have a cup of tea, sit outside, and read a bit. I don’t get to do this often, but I love having some quiet time outdoors.”

Bringing the benefits of space back home

BioOrbit may be operating in space, but its intended impact is firmly on Earth.

As launch and re-entry infrastructure expands, the question is shifting from whether manufacturing in orbit is possible to which products genuinely benefit from microgravity. BioOrbit bets pharmaceuticals will be one of them.

There is still more to do: more flights, more testing, more partnerships with drug companies, and eventually large-scale production. But for Katie, the goal is simple. She wants to make medicines better for the people who need them.

A cancer treatment made hundreds of kilometers above Earth matters because, when it returns, it could let patients get treatment at home instead of in the hospital.

And as Katie likes to remind people looking towards this emerging industry, “There’s space for you.” Check out their work on their website.