Could Launching Tumors Into Space Help Medicine Beat Cancer?

Somewhere over the Atlantic this month, a small payload roughly the size of an oat milk carton is preparing to leave Earth. Inside it are living cancer cells, a self-contained laboratory, and a bet that one of medicine’s oldest problems might finally yield to one of its newest tools: the absence of gravity.

The payload belongs to SPARK Microgravity, a Munich-based startup that in May 2026 is running its first flight demonstration with the SSC Space from Esrange Space Center in Kiruna, Sweden. This mission marks SPARK’s first oncology-focused biological payload in real microgravity. Inside it there is a triple negative breast cancer cell line and SPARK’s autonomous BIOBOX system, designed to validate whether living cancer samples can be prepared, operated, monitored, and recovered under flight conditions without crew intervention in their standardized format for pharma-grade preclinical research.

The company stood on a Davos stage in January and announced plans to build Europe’s first dedicated commercial cancer lab in orbit. They’re not the only ones looking to space in the fight against cancer. A small but growing number of companies is now doing something that might have sounded like science fiction just a few years ago: routinely launching tumors into space to study them.

The reason is actually quite simple. On Earth, gravity distorts the way cancer cells grow in a lab. But in space, tumor cells can self-organize into three-dimensional structures that more closely resemble how tumors grow in the body – though these spheroids still lack features such as vascularization and immune interactions that are present in real tumors. This opens up unprecedented opportunities to understand what’s happening at the cellular level at each stage of cancer development, and could potentially unlock new treatments.

The petri dish problem

Most of what we know about how tumors respond to drugs comes from cancer cells grown in petri dishes. The trouble is that a petri dish is flat, and a tumor in a human body is not. “The problem with a petri dish is that it gives cancer cells a very unnatural environment,” Allison Bajet, CEO and co-founder of SPARK Microgravity, told International Business Times. “Cells flatten, attach to a surface, and behave differently from the way they behave inside the body. That matters, because shape, architecture, and mechanical forces can change gene expression, signaling pathways and ultimately how a tumor appears to respond to a drug.”

In fact, in vitro testing of cancer drugs can be such a poor reflection of how these drugs will work in actually treating cancer that around 90% of drugs fail by the time they reach human trials.

When researchers want a more realistic model, they turn to mice. However, in addition to the ethical issues of testing in mice, Bajet points out that “they are imperfect predictors of human response. A compound can look promising in a mouse and still fail in a patient. That gap is exactly where we believe better human-relevant models are needed.”

Shishir Bankapur, founder and CEO of Helogen – a US-based startup whose autonomous orbital lab platform is partnering with Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center – describes the same problem from a slightly different angle. “Many cancer therapies show promise in early bench studies but struggle to translate successfully into clinical outcomes,” he told International Business Times. “In some solid tumors, the challenge is not simply whether a therapy can affect cancer cells, but whether it can effectively penetrate and distribute throughout the complex three-dimensional tumor architecture, rather than primarily impacting cells near the surface.”

In other words, while tumors in petri dishes are flat carpets of cells, tumors in human bodies are dense and unevenly accessible. Drugs that have success mowing down the carpet often can’t penetrate the ball. As a result, researchers have spent decades trying to develop laboratory models that better capture the complexity of real tumor biology.

What changes in orbit

In microgravity, cancer cells stop being pushed against the bottom of anything. Instead they float, which enables them to grow in three dimensions, and organize themselves into structures that look strikingly like real tumors – what biologists call organoids, or spheroids.

“Microgravity gives us a different biological lens,” says Bajet. “It allows cancer cells to self-organize in three dimensions without the same sedimentation and surface-attachment effects we see on Earth. That can reveal tumor behaviors that are harder to study in conventional lab systems.” Two decades of experiments aboard the International Space Station have shown that these orbital tumors can form larger and more complex spheroids than their Earth-bound equivalents, without the artificial scaffolds researchers normally have to use, and they produce cleaner genomic data because the whole system isn’t being mechanically distorted.

Bajet has a powerful metaphor for it, that she’s used to describe SPARK Microgravity’s mission: “Studying cancer in standard gravity is a little like trying to listen to a symphony next to a construction site. You can still hear the music, but there is a lot of noise from sedimentation, surface attachment, buoyancy-driven flows, and mechanical distortion. Real microgravity turns down that noise. It gives us a cleaner way to observe how cells organize, communicate, and respond.”

Helogen’s research with Memorial Sloan Kettering is exploring a different but complementary angle: radiation. Space is full of low-dose chronic cosmic radiation that causes slow, gentle damage to cells – and that can’t be replicated here on Earth.

“In space, because the intensity of this radiation is low enough, we’re able to actually see how cells repair themselves and rearrange DNA,” Bankapur says. “There are multiple pathways of how this DNA repair occurs, but one particular kind allows us to actually see these imperfect repairs which then lead to mutations in the long term, which then lead to cancers.”

In other words, cells in orbit aren’t killed or irreversibly damaged by radiation (like they would be if exposed to radiation on Earth) – they’re just nicked, the way they are when you spend a few decades being a human. And this gives researchers a rare glimpse into the precise moments where a healthy cell starts to go wrong.

Why now

Three things have collided which are helping to transform space oncology into a more mature field.

The first is that it has proven to deliver. Multiple pharma companies and research institutes now have a footprint in space, with over 500 space-based experiments conducted in protein crystallization alone, and some approved drugs whose development or testing partly took place in space. In one of the latest examples, in September 2025, the US FDA approved a new subcutaneous injectable form of Merck’s blockbuster cancer immunotherapy Keytruda (pembrolizumab) – a formulation made possible in part by more than a decade of protein crystallization experiments aboard the ISS, alongside extensive terrestrial formulation engineering and clinical trials.

The second is the deadline. The ISS – the world’s longest-running space laboratory and the place where most of this work has happened – will be deorbited in 2030. NASA has already invested more than $400 million in commercial replacements from companies like Blue Origin and Voyager Technologies, and a new ecosystem of private launchers is rapidly emerging. As Bajet puts it: “For the first time in history, space will go from government-led missions toward private-run and commercial access. That changes the question from “Can we do this once?” to “Can we make this repeatable and useful for drug development?.” Whatever space oncology is going to be, it’s being built right now.

The third is the disease itself. There were over 20 million new cancer diagnoses worldwide in 2022, and the disease is increasingly hitting younger people. A global study published in late 2025 found that 13 cancer types are now rising in adults under 50 across at least ten countries, and six are rising faster among the young than among older adults. Colorectal cancer incidence among people aged 20 to 34 is projected to rise by 90% by 2030. While existing tools are saving more lives than ever, they’re also not keeping up.

The companies betting on orbit

SPARK and Helogen represent two distinct flavors of the space oncology bet. Helogen is exploring how orbit can be used to study chronic radiation exposure and DNA repair. SPARK Microgravity is focused more narrowly on cancer drug development by building better tumor models and studying how SPARK-grown cancer cells respond to therapeutic interventions.

“We seeSPARK as the application layer for space-based oncology,” Bajet says. “The launch vehicles, capsules, and station are the infrastructure. What we are building is the biological workflow that makes that infrastructure useful for cancer researchers and pharmaceutical teams.”

SPARK’s platform is an autonomous orbital cancer lab for oncology assays. The company’s focus is about making microgravity usable as a repeatable preclinical testing environment. It’s service model is designed to let pharmaceutical and translational teams run controlled oncology experiments in real microgravity from early proof-of-concept assays to more tailored studies where tumor models, dosing schedules, and readouts are designed around a specific research question.

Helogen’s platform is a fully autonomous system that handles everything from cell culture and drug dosing to imaging and on-orbit DNA sequencing – the equivalent, Bankapur says, of a “best-in-class lab here on Earth.” Astronaut time on the ISS costs between $150,000 and $200,000 an hour, so removing the human from the loop is what makes the economics work. Helogen and the MSK researcher they partner with both won the 2024 Humans in Space Challenge, a global competition run by Korean healthcare investment company Boryung, for a study aimed at reducing cancer risk in people exposed to chronic radiation, such as airline pilots, radar operators and submarine crews.

“The study is aimed to reduce the cancer risk amongst these professionals,” Bankapur explains. “So it was looking at prevention rather than a cure.” Asked what that could ultimately produce, he’s careful: “It’s a little too early to speculate. But that’s the hope that there could one day be a prophylactic that you can take that would prevent cancers over time.”

The applications go beyond oncology too. Microgravity accelerates certain biological aging processes dramatically: months in orbit equate to years on earth. “It’s almost like having a time machine,” Bankapur says. This makes the same hardware useful for studying neurodegenerative disease, muscular degeneration and heart disease.

A clinic in low Earth orbit

When you ask the founders to describe where this all leads, the answer gets ambitious quickly.Bajet’s vision is a future where space testing is a standard regulatory step in drug approval, slotted in alongside the computer models and animal studies that drugs already have to clear. “Yes, but it has to earn that role” she says, when asked whether she sees it becoming compulsory. “This is absolutely the direction we want to help build toward. Our goal is to generate that quality of evidence that allows our hardware to become a recognized preclinical tool.”

Further out, she describes something that does sound like science fiction, but is genuinely on the company’s roadmap. “We see a future in 2050, that space-based biology feels normal as genomic sequencing does today. SPARK Microgravity has a long-term vision that is deeply personal. If a patient is diagnosed with cancer, we want a future where their tumor can be tested in the most informative environments available. Imagine being able to grow a patient’s tumor model, expose it to several therapies, and help the physician see which option is most likely to work before the patient receives the first dose.”

However, there are obvious reasons to be cautious. Space is still expensive and bureaucratic; Bajet says safety certifications alone take eight to nine months for each new launcher, and have to be redone every time. Plus, most pharmaceutical companies still need to be educated on what microgravity research even is. “We spend a lot of time translating between two worlds. Space people understand the infrastructure, and biotech people understand the disease. SPARK Microgravity sits in the middle and says this isn’t about sending things to space, it is about building better evidence for cancer research,” Bajet says of the work of getting biotech to take orbit seriously.

And the main caveat is that most of what’s been demonstrated so far is very promising, but it’s not necessarily offering a cure. The tumor-in-orbit-for-personalized-therapy future is decades away from anyone’s hospital.

But the direction of travel is no longer uncertain. For decades, researchers have been working to develop lab models that reflect the true complexity of cancer, and still witness most of drugs fail when they reach real patients. For the first time, there’s a viable alternative – and it’s about to become routinely accessible.

It turns out that to get a clearer view of what’s happening inside our bodies, we may have had to leave them – and our planet – entirely.