Authors: Elena Vrabie and Adriana Spulber
Proteins, the microscopic building blocks responsible for most biological functions, often pose challenges for scientific study. On Earth, many are prone to misfolding or aggregation, hindering research and increasing costs and delays in developing essential treatments. Could the unique laboratory environment of microgravity in space offer a breakthrough for biotech innovation? Could this new setting compel proteins to behave more predictably?
Toby Call has been exploring space and biotech for over a decade, first in theory and now as the co-founder of Mass Balance. The biotech company aims to leverage microgravity to discover and produce proteins in new ways. Currently operating out of London and Bengaluru, the team is gearing up for their first orbital mission in Q2 2026 to accelerate the development of therapies that could save lives on Earth.
With a background in synthetic biology, a PhD in industrial biotechnology, and a successful previous entrepreneurial stint at Hurdle, where his team advanced industry‑leading saliva‑based diagnostics during COVID and forged strategic partnerships with global firms like Bayer for epigenetic aging tests, he now embarks on a mission to develop drugs for previously untreatable diseases.
In this interview, Toby discusses how removing gravity may change protein behavior, help scientists study difficult disease targets, and reduce production challenges like protein clumping. Using space as a research environment is not a novel idea, but generating valuable biological data and building proprietary biotech IP for a better world is still not done at scale.
Underline Ventures: Why biology and space? What sparked for you the connection between them?
Toby Call: My inspiration for space biotech sparked over ten years ago. I was doing a PhD in industrial biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, applying biology to bio-electrochemical systems to get electricity from photosynthetic bacteria. During that time, back in 2015, I did a summer course called the International Space University, at that time based in Ohio.
What really struck me was that I was the only biologist on the course. There were engineers, lawyers, and business people, and it became obvious to me that for humans to do anything long-term outside of our biosphere, we need to take biology with us. It’s crucial. And on the flip side, the life science industry can learn a lot from the space environment, from the new physics we can access in microgravity.
UV: You spent years at Hurdle before founding Mass Balance. What did that experience teach you about building a startup and navigating the pharma market?
TC: With Hurdle, we turned new science into diagnostics and prevention products to empower individuals at scale. For example, we developed the first saliva-based epigenetic biomarker for inflammaging, and the team continues to innovate at the forefront of AI-driven biomarkers. I learned that fundamental science can be fertile ground for extrapolating creative ideas and developing conviction around a product that can solve customer problems, even if few others get it initially.
It was an incredible journey for me with an awesome team of co-founders, five in total, called the SWAT team. We would just land anywhere, deploy, and solve any problem. I also learned how important it is to find the right founding team with the right mix of skills, which I took forward into Mass Balance.
In terms of how to work with life sciences markets, for any technology, but especially in healthcare and biotech, you often start by having technical conversations with people, speaking their language to understand their problems. But it doesn’t really matter what the technology is; it’s all about outcomes for patients.
Also, in pharma, you need to level with the R&D scientists, often the decision makers for partnerships, and show how good science can impact cycles and budgets. And you’ve got smaller biotechs, large institutional organizations like the NHS in the UK, big pharma, and big health systems like those in the US that all have their quirks in how they operate.
Working with pharma clients can be fantastic, but winning them over takes lengthy relationship building and understanding the organization. There’s a lot more that goes into project management than pure face-to-face sales, but when you get in front of people and can move the needle for their pain points, it can be collaborative and fun.
UV: What would you say to founders pondering whether they should sign the deal or not with big pharma?
TC: The reality for early-stage companies is that a predictable pipeline of perfectly shaped ideal customer profiles is a dream – a pipedream. Often, the first big customer can be transformational in terms of revenue, taking serious jumps. But in practice, it can come down to serendipity, so how are you actively increasing your chances by getting out there?
Be in the right place at the right time, have the right connections, and land a contract with a large company that is suddenly ready for your service, and everyone is taking you seriously.
And then you can worry about getting pigeonholed. If all your risk is in that one customer. So your efforts have to be: serve that customer, focus on their needs, grow with them, and also try to find a couple of others to diversify your revenue base. It’s a tricky thing. You also might not be at the stage where you have the team size or capability to serve ten big pharma companies. So it’s a question of growth trajectory: can you manage that?
UV: Let’s get to gravity and microgravity. What specific effects does it have, and why does that matter to biology?
TC: Gravity is very easy to forget about because it’s all humans have ever known. It’s really hard to avoid being crushed between weight, the force of gravity acting on mass, and the counterforce from the solid Earth pushing back. There are effects that we completely take for granted, particularly in how fluids behave and how biological systems operate, especially in the lab, in manufacturing, assays, and discovery.
With gravity, you have density-driven buoyancy. Things that are denser sink, things that are less dense rise. You can see it in a flame, for example, hot air is less dense, so it rises. The same happens in fluids: pockets of slightly less dense fluid rise, creating constant convection currents, and then the mass sediments go to the bottom.
That’s the state we’re used to on Earth. It doesn’t happen in microgravity. You put something into freefall around our planet, and you take away those fundamental fluid dynamics, you can essentially cancel them out. One way to think about the microgravity environment is that it’s the most profoundly still, hyper-quiescent environment we can access for experiments and manufacturing.
UV: Can you further explain what happens when you remove gravity, and what it unlocks?
TC: Microgravity can fundamentally change the physical environment. When we’re looking at making more complex proteins and nanostructures, and also finding targets for difficult-to-drug proteins, there’s an unlock we think comes from having a super still environment. It may extend the stability of certain things we want to make, and also impact how we’re able to interrogate the molecular behavior of things like misfolding and intrinsically disordered protein regions that can drive diseases.
From the undruggable target side: if we’re able to access intermediate states of misfolding or disordered proteins that were previously inaccessible, those are potentially new ways of drugging and curing diseases.
We’re working with the market to guide where we focus, but one example is KRAS (Kirsten rat sarcoma virus oncogene homolog), which is a historically undruggable protein involved in many cancers, and present in 95% of cases of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). That’s a horrible disease with less than 10% survival over five years, killing half a million people a year.
KRAS is really hard to drug because it has a very smooth outside surface, very few binding pockets, and regions that are disordered as it changes conformation and function. With microgravity, we could build higher resolution assays that may identify weaker binders and different ways of accessing this hard-to-drug protein in a very still environment, without this constant micro-turbulence.
Then on the manufacturing side, a lot of drugs coming from R&D to manufacturing have huge issues with misfolding and aggregation, which can be a massive cost driver for pharma when scaling up.
UV: Can you dive into what that manufacturing challenge actually looks like?
TC: Protein-based therapeutics hold enormous promise to combat disease, but new drug modalities are getting more sophisticated and more complex. These artificially designed proteins can be chimeric, or a fusion protein, for example, where you’ve taken chunks of different antibodies and fused them with something like a cytokine. When you make these unnatural structures, they can be very difficult to make at scale. Even if it worked in a bench-top bioreactor, there are more often than not significant challenges to scaling up that can even halt development. They start misfolding, they aggregate, and they essentially drop out of your production batch.
So the question is: if we do this in a completely new physics environment – super still, very low perturbations to trigger those aggregation events – can we take drugs that were previously unmanufacturable and make them manufacturable? We still have a lot of work to do here, but we already have partners looking into this with us.
That leads to the technology we want to build. Rather than going straight for scale-up manufacturing, we want to find the drugs that are unlocked by space, use a data and AI-driven approach to find the IP around space-essential drugs, and then go make them. That’s why we’re a biotech company first. We think scale-up manufacturing is super exciting, but right now we’re focused on the discovery side.
UV: That brings us to March 2025, when you launched Mass Balance. What made now the right time to tackle biologics manufacturing in space?
TC: There are many reasons why now is the right time, and I’ve been watching this industry obsessively for a long time.
For starters, we have decades of life science research in space to lean on. Some of the first experiments in space were life science experiments, a lot of them to understand astronaut health, but also using the space environment as an analog for things like bone density changes, accelerated aging, and understanding fundamental biology. Then there’s the protein crystallization story, which goes back two to three decades to Skylab, and a long history of pharma being involved, looking at how to make better protein crystals for drug discovery.
The first reason why now is the right time to be building is access. Five years ago, doing this kind of solution would have seemed crazy expensive, but the cost of launch is plummeting. There’s a temporary blip because SpaceX has a monopoly right now, but as more rocket companies build, there will be real competition to make it essentially like FedEx.
The second piece needed for a thriving in-space manufacturing economy was infrastructure, in-space platforms, and reliable downmass. Bringing stuff back down regularly, not relying on the ISS and crew returns to get your samples back. There are now a ton of companies solving that problem, and there’s going to be a massive supply spike in two to three years that we want to ride.
On the equipment side, there have been massive advances in microfluidics, automation, and miniaturization of analytics equipment, technologies that are becoming more compact, which lends itself perfectly to being mass-efficient for space.
What we’re doing at Mass Balance is bringing together a strong base in life sciences with these technology trends. The key push over the edge right now is that biologics are exploding in complexity, cancer rates are rising, and there are still lots of undruggable diseases that defy the smartest minds in biotech and kill millions each year.
We need new environments to accelerate drug development and bring them to the market. When you apply new physics to biology, you get breakthroughs. Microgravity is a perfect example of an untapped physics realm we can apply to biology: to unlock discovery, save pharma time and money, and ultimately save lives.
UV: How is Mass Balance taking shape so far?
TC: We’re currently raising pre-seed, and in terms of what we’ve done, we had an opportunity to get to space quickly. In less than three months, we designed, built, and integrated our first payload with our satellite partner in the Netherlands.
It’s essentially a proof of concept for an autonomous closed laboratory system that can store lyophilized cells and media, and upon the right trigger, mix the two and start measuring growth and biocatalysis from recombinant enzyme production using optical sensors. We’re testing systems for gas exchange and temperature control, as we can’t let it freeze or overheat, and we’ll receive data via telemetry on what’s happening in space.
We custom-built it in the UK around an architecture using 3D-printed microfluidic chambers. We loaded our cells into the device in our Bengaluru lab, then integrated them with our satellite company partners in mainland Europe. It was a fantastic experience. And we proved that two biologists can get a respectable piece of hardware built and flown in space with super-tight timelines and a shoestring budget.
This leans into the culture we want to build, operating cost-efficiently and at high speed. That’s a culture change from a lot of legacy space industry, where things are expected to take a long time and cost a lot of money. Space will always have some inherent costs, but with launch costs dropping and the ability to take off-the-shelf components and qualify them for space, there’s really a lot you can do, especially leveraging the Indian ecosystem, with super high-quality manufacturing and talent, but more cost-effective than the US or Europe.
What we’re looking at next is how we expand that architecture. How do we go from one experimental channel to hundreds or thousands, super high-throughput, build a fleet of platforms with regular launch cadence, and incorporate much more sophisticated analytics directly relevant to what biotech and pharma need to unlock drug discovery?
My co-founder, Vishnu, is currently based in India, and while we plan to consolidate in London, the links we already have between the UK and India are fantastic: we get access to the UK, EU, and US environment, and India itself is a huge hub for biopharma and space.
UV: How is Mission One taking shape, and what are your 2026 plans?
TC: We’re very new, and as soon as we get funding, I’d love to double down on customer discovery efforts to help shape our Mission Two. There is a lot of latent interest in biopharma, but it needs galvanizing. There is a nascent space biotech industry that loves to meet up, and that community is fantastic. But what really gets me excited is going to pharma conferences and meeting the pharma industry directly and getting our value propositions torn to shreds and rebuilt.
On Mission One, one of the constraints we face as a biotech company wanting to operate in space is the existing launch paradigm. In the current architecture, launch providers have a long wait window: your experiment goes into a warehouse and can launch five months later, which can make or break biology.
We’ve had to adapt to that, for example, by using lyophilized cells and making our systems stable in a dormant phase. But that limits what kind of experiments you can do. What’s coming with new launch providers is this concept of late access: being able to load your payload in the hours before launch, which opens up much more sensitive payloads. On this first one, our options are more limited. SpaceX has its own agendas and is minimally flexible, but as a service, it’s been game-changing for the world.
In terms of mission success, honestly, we’ve already succeeded on 80% of it. The process of designing, building, working with engineering and launch partners, and learning everything you don’t know about launching a biological payload into space is an invaluable experience, and we got it very early. We’ll earn our “spaceflight heritage”, which people say is an important early metric for space companies, and it’s indicative of the speed we want to maintain going forward.
Mission Two, imaginatively named, is really about taking those lessons and building something closer to an MVP: a platform that produces meaningful data on biological discovery and development. That data is what will unlock biotech markets, because big pharma and biotech are data-driven and respect good science. It will demonstrate that we’re serious as a biotech company, not just building gizmos for space experiments, but unlocking new biotech value propositions that we believe are waiting there for us. If everything goes to plan, we could potentially launch Mission Two by the end of 2026.
UV: Companies like Varda have raised hundreds of millions, and BioOrbit is working on antibodies in the UK. How do you plan to differentiate yourself in an increasingly competitive field?
TC: Honestly, it’s not even going to get competitive for a while. When you see a space biotech company, you remember it. But if you see an AI discovery company, there are thousands of them.
Biotech is huge, and especially if you’re going after specific drug development: how many drugs are there in pipelines around the world? Thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions. Each of those could be a billion-dollar opportunity. So there is a huge pie here for everyone to nibble at.
What’s nice is that in the UK, we actually have a bit of a cluster forming. I’d say three of us are doing space-related biotech, each with very different angles. BioOrbit has built a strong story around protein crystallization for drug formulation and has done a great job connecting it to patient impact. Varda in the US is also going after protein crystallization, and they’re a great example of vertical integration by building the return capsules as well, and they’re well-capitalised, which is a great signal for the market.
On our side, we’re adamant we don’t want to be a platform-as-a-service; that’s just the starting model to get clients and learnings. But in my opinion, you have to integrate one way or another. Either you integrate into space, like Varda, and build the physical infrastructure, or you integrate into biotech, which is what we’re doing: owning more of the biotech IP and building a team that reflects that.
UV: What is your vision for IP and regulatory approval pathways moving forward?
TC: It’s an evolving landscape. On IP, there are opportunities to protect and defend the application of the hardware platform as well as the products. Building hardware to access unique data from unique environments is a lot more defensible.
There’s an interesting parallel with what you see in AI and data companies right now, where specific hardware has been built to access data from specific environments. That is unique, and having access to that, to build AI on top of it, is exactly what we do. You could almost think of us as mining biological data and IP from the space environment.
On the regulatory side, positive noises are coming from the FDA and other key institutions. It will be a little while before the first drug with space manufacturing processes in the loop gets to market, but that’s plenty of time for the FDA to come around and say: ”We’re okay with this, we can assign GMP (good manufacturing practice) status to your processes”.
That’s something the market is very much looking at, and it is vital to involve organisations like the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency), which we’re speaking to, early on. But on the R&D side, you can create a lot of value before you encounter regulatory requirements. It’s an interesting regulatory challenge, but not insurmountable.
UV: Health-focused investors have historically been scarce compared to other verticals, partly because of the time and capital required to develop solutions. How do you navigate investor hesitancy in your space since you’re currently fundraising?
TC: There’s definitely an element of investors learning and becoming comfortable with new concepts. In a way, we have a dual-use pitch: both in how we approach investors and in how we’re building the company.
You can tell some are still fact-finding, still figuring out the market. But even over the past year, it’s gone from something very niche to something most people have heard about. Because space sticks in people’s minds, you hear about it, you remember it.
We’ve actually tapped into that quite a bit. Some investors aren’t focused on health at all, but they’re curious about space, and they’d back something that touches health if it’s framed primarily as a space play. So the real question is: how do we pitch ourselves to different kinds of investors? They all have different theses and preconceptions.
A space-focused fund, for example, will be more attuned to infrastructure. They’ll ask: What space platforms are you integrating with? And the answer is there are tons of them, and they all want business from companies like ours. Really smart engineers are solving the remaining technical problems, and costs will keep dropping. That question doesn’t worry me.
On the biotech side, some investors are genuinely excited by space. They like the idea of a new physics paradigm applied to biology. Others, you can treat space as a black box entirely. You say: forget the space angle, that’s just infrastructure and logistics. What we’re unlocking is new capabilities that impact your discovery programme, your yields, or difficult proteins you’re trying to express, and, ultimately, getting new therapies to patients.
