SPARK Microgravity is developing Europe’s first orbital cancer lab dedicated hardware platform designed specifically for advanced cancer and drug research in space. The Munich-based startup aims to enable groundbreaking cancer studies that are not possible on Earth, accelerating new drug discoveries and treatment innovations.
SPARK, which won the startup competition at the Barcelona Deep Tech Summit November 5 believes that conducting research in space will bring the world closer to developing cancer therapies and making personalized oncology a reality.
“We want to cure cancer in space,” CEO Allison Bajet, who co-founded SPARK in 2024 with Katharina Weidmann, said in an interview with The Innovator. While the company is first targeting pharmaceutical companies as clients its mission is “to make space oncology research accessible to all not just big players who can afford to go up in space,” she says.
SPARK is among the growing number of actors, including five of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies and other startups, that are using space to gather new insights into human health. That’s because microgravity—a condition in which gravitational forces are significantly weaker than on Earth—alters cellular and biochemical processes in ways that can’t be replicated on the ground. These dynamics, present on orbiting crewed spacecraft like the International Space Station (ISS), create unique opportunities for pharmaceutical research including advances in protein crystallization, in molecular modeling, and in complex biological studies.
As the ISS and other orbital platforms become more accessible for scientific experimentation, space-based drug development is shifting from theoretical promise to operational reality, says the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation. (ITIF) a think tank for science and technology policy. Biopharmaceutical firms, research institutions, and federal agencies—including NASA, the U.S.’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), and private partners—are exploring the potential of microgravity to solve long-standing challenges in biomedical innovation.
In space, proteins often crystallize into more uniform structures helping scientists design better-targeted therapies. Microgravity also allows researchers to observe cellular behavior and tissue growth in more natural, 3-D ways, free from the effects of gravity, which cause cells to settle on Earth. These insights could offer a possible way to accelerate drug discovery, improve formulation strategies, and enable more effective treatments.
Bajet notes that in vivo (living) cancer research on Earth often relies on mice models that translate to humans only about 8% to 34% of the time. “Over the last 20 years, with heavy support from NASA, researchers found cancer cells grown in space have an 85% similarity to how it grows in the human body, enabling us to see a cancer cell’s true behavior,” says Bajet. “We don’t need any additional tools. The cells don’t float downward and the buoyancy of mixing is more uniform. Space provides us the perfect laboratory.”
Several space-based research examples cited by the ITIF illustrate this. For example, many diseases are caused by malfunctioning proteins. To develop treatments,researchers must understand the protein’s structure, which often starts with protein crystallization—where dissolved proteins are coaxed into forming solid, ordered crystals analyzed using X-ray diffraction. On Earth, this process is difficult; in microgravity, however, crystals grow larger and with fewer defects, making them easier to study. Over 500 such experiments have taken place aboard the International Space Station (ISS), an orbital laboratory is operated through a global of space agencies, including NASA, Roscosmos, the European Space Agency, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and the Canadian Space Agency.
Companies like Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb have used the ISS to advance protein studies, including early work on insulin, according to the ITIF.
Merck, for its part, has explored how growing protein crystals in space could help reformulate its cancer drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab) from an IV to an injectable form. In 2017, the company sent the drug to the ISS to see if microgravity could produce smaller, more uniform crystals. Early results showed improved viscosity and injectability compared to Earth-grown crystals, according to the ITIF.
Despite these breakthroughs space-based research remains prohibitively expensive as today drug companies must pay anywhere from $150,000 to $2 million for such experiments, limiting advances, says Bajet. The expense is partly due to the necessity of crew intervention. It costs $100,000 an hour to use an astronaut’s time. SPARK aims to remove the expensive financial barrier for researchers worldwide.
AI isn’t much help in making research on Earth more efficient as the underlying human cancer data that train these models are deeply skewed. Historically the data is built from clinical trials that over represent white men and under present women and people of color. Even today fewer than 5% of oncology trials include participants from low and middle income regions. This means that the vast majority of global populations remain under represented in clinical research, says Bajet. Applying the technology to skewed data would only amplify the distortion.
Oncologists currently still use a one-size-fits-most approach to cancer treatments. As a result, cancer patients -on average -need to switch chemotherapy treatments several times before finding one that works, she says. Each treatment takes a toll on patients increasing their suffering by causing side effects like hair loss and nausea and delaying effective treatment.
SPARK aims to offer a more personalized approach. “Our vision is that when cancer patients get screened instead of studying their cells on Earth, we send their cell line to space and expose it to different drug therapies to find out which one works best so we can use the right drug the first time,” Bajet says.
SPARK’s orbital cancer lab is the size of a milk carton on its side. It built its first experimental hardware to be flight ready by bootstrapping with €500,000 in pre-seed funding from U.S. and European angles and support from the European Space Agency Business Incubation Centre Bavaria.
SPARK, which is filing five patents, plans to launch its first autonomous lab into space in early 2026 on the Dream Chaser, an American reusable lifting-body spaceplane developed by Sierra Space being developed in a cargo configuration for missions to the ISS.
Competitors include SpacePharma, which in 2024 was selected for the European Innovation Council (EIC) accelerator program, receiving significant funding to advance SPACTORY, its fully automated microgravity space factory; Yuri Gravity, which is aiming to develop tomorrow’s cures and solutions with in-house developed space labs and ground simulators and Space Tango which earlier this year completed a microbiology investigation developed in partnership with Israel’s Sheba Medical Center/ARC Space Lab, following its time aboard the ISS on NASA’s 11th crewed mission with SpaceX.
Weidmann says SPARK’s main differentiators are:
*SPARK is completely autonomous making it 10X cheaper than systems requiring human intervention
*It is not dependent on the ISS and is one-size-fits all, meaning it can fit on any type of launcher. This is important because the ISS will be decommissioned by 2030 and be replaced by five private companies, she says.
*Its space laboratory is designed to withstand extreme temperatures on Earth during pre-launch storage and the stress of rocket vibrations.
*It will be the only space lab focused on cancer, allowing it to use the same processes and hardware for all experiments.
“There were 4,400 nanosatellites in space. Only seven are dedicated to life sciences and zero on cancer, “ says Bajet.
SPARK says it is in advanced discussions with pharmaceutical companies and research organizations for upcoming flight experiments in 2026.
The first iteration of its service will be to bring experiments up to space for clients, bring it back down and provide clients with encrypted results. The plan is to anonymize test data so that it can be accessed by more cancer specialists at a cheap price point via a subscription to its orbital data lake. This would give oncologists affordable access to unique microgravity insights, says Bajet.
“With the ISS era ending and private space stations on the rise SPARK Microgravity aims to make space biology a daily tool in oncology with every cancer experiment in orbit bringing patients on Earth closer to tailored, effective therapies,” she says.
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