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VCs Invest $90M in Varda Space Industries' Microgravity Drug Manufacturing

"Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding," reports TechCrunch, "just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit." Varda has now raised $145 million to date, the article points out, and the $90 million in new Series B funding "marks an inflection poi...

Part of the reason Varda is possible today is due to the availability of regular, low-cost rideshare launches from SpaceX and Rocket Lab's innovations in satellite bus manufacturing. Even beyond these external partnerships, the startup has made significant headway in its own right, as the success of the first mission showed: Their reentry capsule appears to have performed flawlessly and the experiment to reformulate the HIV medicine ritonavir was executed without a hitch, it says. Varda has also started publishing the results of its internal R&D efforts, including a scientific paper on its hyper-gravity (as opposed to microgravity) crystallization platform, which the startup developed as a sort of screening method prior to sending drugs to space.

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