Varda to collaborate with United Therapeutics on microgravity drug research

WASHINGTON — Varda Space Industries has signed its first major agreement with a pharmaceutical company to develop improved drugs in microgravity.

Varda announced May 13 an agreement with United Therapeutics to study development of novel formulations of drugs, starting with treatments for rare pulmonary disease, on Varda’s spacecraft.

“Microgravity gives us a fundamentally different environment to manufacture pharmaceuticals that are otherwise impossible on Earth,” said Will Bruey, chief executive of Varda, in a statement. “Our collaboration with United Therapeutics strives to pioneer a new era in clinical development by completing the bridge from microgravity science to patient benefit on Earth.”

“The collaboration with Varda will allow us to explore how space-based manufacturing could contribute to significant improvements for rare pulmonary disease treatments,” Martine Rothblatt, chair and chief executive of United Therapeutics, said in the statement.

The companies did not disclose the timeline for conducting the drug studies, which will use Varda’s W-series spacecraft that host the pharmaceutical payloads and bring the results back on reentry capsules. The companies also did not disclose financial terms of the deal.

The potential benefits of microgravity for pharmaceutical studies have long been of interest to both researchers and companies. Microgravity offers the ability to create crystal structures that are difficult or impossible to produce on Earth because of factors such as sedimentation and convection currents. Those novel structures can lead to drugs with improved performance.

Varda has identified pharmaceutical research as one key market for its spacecraft. The company raised $187 million in a Series C round in July 2025 and said it would use some of the capital to build out a pharmaceutical lab for conducting drug formulation research in space.

“We’re focused on delivering differentiated formulations and building the foundation of a new generation of manufacturing,” Adrian Radocea, chief science officer of Varda, said in a statement about the United Therapeutics deal.

At the Beyond Earth Symposium in February, Rothblatt said her company was in discussions about doing pharmaceutical research with Varda. “People can do things like this with the space station, and I have thought about it many a time, but it is such a logistical hassle to get up to the space station,” she said.

“With Varda, everything is just routinized,” she said, given Varda’s ability to launch spacecraft through SpaceX rideshare missions and control the experiments once in orbit. “Being able to come up with new molecules as a result of our contract with Varda opens up billions of dollars in markets.”

She did not rule out eventually doing such research on future commercial space stations. “If we can change the shape of molecules into novel shapes with low Earth orbit automated spacecraft, just imagine what we could do with a fully staffed and operational space station.”