Houston-based startup announces integration of orbital biomedical OS to advance biological discovery in low Earth orbit

Commercial space station developer Starlab Space announced this week that it has partnered with Helogen Corporation, the automation platform industrializing orbit by enabling scalable, regulatory-grade manufacturing and autonomous biological operations in space. 

Through the partnership, Houston-based Starlab and New York-founded Helogen will expand how life sciences research is conducted in microgravity, moving from isolated experiments toward persistent and scalable discovery in orbit. 

The announcement comes at a time of record-breaking microgravity research and innovation; International Space Station (ISS), for one, reported that a historic 76 peer-reviewed studies were published throughout 2025 – the highest annual total ever. Research now spans  biomedics, materials science, Earth science, and technology development. 

In fact, 2026 is expected to build on last year’s landmark denomination for space-based research and development. Scientific research results are no longer just individual, but rather part of an expanding ecosystem of innovation activities in orbit. 

“Microgravity is not just a research environment. It’s a fundamentally new manufacturing and discovery regime,” stressed Shishit Bankapur, CEO at Helogen. 

“At Helogen, our mission is to unlock biological processes that Earth’s gravity suppresses and translate them into scalable breakthroughs in medicine and materials. Starlab’s globally accessible orbital platform, combined with HEL-IOS, allows researchers to run, iterate and scale biology in space faster than ever before, shifting from one-off experiments to continuous, high-throughput discovery.” 

HEL-IOS is the world’s first orbital biomedical operating system. Now, it will be integrated into Starlab’s ecosystem, enabling fully autonomous regulatory-grade manufacturing of high-value biomaterials in orbit via biological cultivation, processing, sequencing and in-line analytics into a single closed-loop system – which operates without continuous crew intervention. 

“This partnership reflects exactly how we envision life sciences operating in low Earth orbit. By integrating autonomous biological systems like HEL-IOS into Starlab, we’re enabling researchers to move beyond short-duration experiments and toward sustained discovery and manufacturing workflows that can deliver real impact on Earth,” added Marshall Smith, CEO of Starlab. 

The startup’s market-driven business model is designed to reduce cost, complexity and risk for researchers and commercial partners. Its single-launch, no-assembly-required architecture enables full certification and operational readiness within weeks from launch – minimizing delays and maximizing efficiency for payload customers. 

Microgravity offers conditions that cannot be replicated on Earth, allowing for improved protein crystallization to support drug development, 3D cell growth and disease models that more closely mimic human biology, and advanced stem cell research with potential applications in treating conditions like Parkinson’s, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

Featured image: A Chosen Soul via Unsplash+

Disclosure: This article mentions clients of an Espacio portfolio company.