SpacePharma

SpacePharma flies laboratories the size of a shoebox. Its miniaturised, remotely operated lab systems run biology and chemistry experiments in microgravity, on free-flying satellites of its own and inside the International Space Station, with customers watching and adjusting from the ground. The DIDO satellites carried the early missions; later hardware has flown on commercial resupply and private missions.

The company is Swiss by registration and Israeli by engineering, founded in 2012 on the observation that microgravity changes how fluids mix, crystals form and cells behave, and that pharmaceutical researchers would pay for access if it did not require an astronaut's time. Automating the laboratory removes the most expensive ingredient.

The flight record is real and repetitive in the best way: DIDO-3 in 2020, an ISS lab installed via a private Axiom mission in 2022, a skin-cell experiment for a Swiss biotech in 2023, and brain tumour samples returned from the station in 2026, among more than a dozen missions. The caveats are the usual small-company ones. Most mission accounts come from SpacePharma itself, the European expansion leans on a conditional EU grant, and the business has yet to show that pharmaceutical microgravity research is a market rather than a series of grants.