A British space start-up has launched a longevity laboratory into orbit

Space becomes represents the next frontier in longevity research.

A British startup has just launched its own chemical experiments into orbit in the hope that the zero-gravity data will shed airy on a group of disease-causing proteins too hard to study on Earth. But first they need to check whether their autonomous laboratory will operate in space.

Mass Balance’s grapefruit-sized apparatus containing chemicals, sensors and controls that keep the chemicals working launched on a SpaceX transporter on Tuesday morning. The experiment, housed in a 10-centimeter capsule built by the Austrian company Tumbleweed, will orbit the Earth for several months, automatically measuring and transmitting data about how living cells grow, react and function in conditions of feeble gravity.

This is the first test of a system that the company hopes can provide high-quality data unavailable on Earth, where stronger gravity causes effects such as convection, which flows heat, and sedimentation, which causes heavier compounds to settle out, disrupting data collection.

“When you take away gravity, a lot of weird and wonderful things happen, and some of them will be very valuable to life sciences and pharma,” says Mass Balance co-founder and CEO Toby Call in an interview. “It sounds crazy today, but really the goal is to make space boring, unreliable, and just another research environment.”

This research environment could be crucial in imaging disordered proteins, he says, which are responsible for age-related diseases including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and some cancers.

On Earth, these proteins constantly change shape, making them hard to image. This creates a gap in training data for life science models like Google’s AlphaFold, leaving them unable to predict how disordered proteins will behave and how they will respond to drugs.

But in space, scientists be carefulsome disease-causing disordered proteins may be easier to study and analyze. Call plans to generate data by running tests on disordered proteins in microgravity and employ it to train an AI model adapter that fills in the gaps — the model, data licensing, and data access generate revenue for his company.

For now, however, the company is only testing its operating system and data capture. Tuesday’s mission will carry an industrial biocatalyst into space that will break down a different chemical compound. The platform will monitor the process using airy to confirm that the chemical reaction is proceeding as planned.

Several other biotech startups are trying to create orbital laboratories. In May, British company BioOrbit launched a test unit that grows ultrapure, stable crystals that can be turned into injectable anti-cancer drugs, while American company Varda Space Industries is similarly working to process pharmaceuticals in microgravity. Unlike those two companies, Mass Balance is not trying to bring its system back to Earth intact, which spares it some of the larger engineering challenges of ensuring it can withstand the extreme temperatures and stresses that satellites experience as they return through Earth’s atmosphere.

“Microgravity is a new tool that is underutilized,” Call says.