Varda Space Industries achieved the first successful commercial space reentry in Australia, a milestone for the industry. Varda's co-founder and president, Delian Asparouhov, joins Josh Lipton on Asking for a Trend to discuss how the company is leveraging commercial space flights to modify pharmaceuticals.
Asparouhov explains that the concept of leveraging microgravity in space on materials from earth has been around since the 1950s, but the "biggest inflection point for the field" in the sector was in 2019 with one of Merck's (MRK) cancer compounds, Keytruda, which drove $25 billion in revenue in 2024.
"Basically, what [Merck] showed in microgravity was they could take this cancer drug from something that would require a four- to six-hour intravenous drip, and instead they can provide a subcutaneous injection; think of it as a syringe that you can pick up from your pharmacy," he says.
"When you think about the active ingredient in pharmaceuticals, it's by far the most expensive sort of material that you have on the entire planet per unit kilogram," Asparouhov tells Yahoo Finance, underlining the value of Varda's work.
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This post was written by Naomi Buchanan.