Mass Balance launches orbital lab to study aging proteins in microgravity

Mass Balance, a British space biotech startup, sent its first autonomous laboratory into orbit on a SpaceX transporter Tuesday. The grapefruit-sized pod—built by Austria's Tumbleweed—contains chemicals, sensors, and control systems to measure how live cells grow and react under weak gravity. CEO Toby Call explains that on Earth, stronger gravity causes convection and sedimentation, muddying data collection. The company's ultimate goal is to study disordered proteins responsible for age-related diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and certain cancers. These proteins constantly change shape, making them nearly impossible to image on Earth, leaving AI models like Google's AlphaFold with critical training data gaps.

Call plans to use microgravity data to train an AI model adapter that predicts how disordered proteins behave and respond to drugs. Revenue will come from data licensing and access. This first mission tests the platform's operating system by tracking an industrial biocatalyst breaking down another compound using light sensors. Unlike rivals BioOrbit and Varda Space Industries, Mass Balance won't return its hardware to Earth, avoiding the engineering challenge of re-entry. "Microgravity is a new tool that is underexploited," Call says.