Helogen, the company that builds autonomous factories in space for advanced material production, today announced a multi-mission partnership with University College London (UCL) to manufacture and study next-generation bone substitutes in space. Helogen is advancing an initial slate of eight orbital missions over the coming year, with the manifest expected to grow, and is opening a new manufacturing facility in Los Angeles to support the rapid scale-up supporting the expanding customer base.

Through the partnership, UCL’s Division of Surgery and Interventional Science will run a phased, multi-mission program aboard Helogen’s Cellular Experiment Laboratory System (CELS), the NASA TechLeap Prize-winning autonomous biological processing platform. UCL brings the scientific methodology, experiment design, protocols, and post-flight analysis to the multi-mission orbital program, while Helogen builds the flight hardware, integrates the payloads, and operates the mission in orbit.

Helogen’s upcoming missions this October center on demonstrating, producing, and returning biomaterials made in orbit: advanced medical and surgical materials that cannot be manufactured at the same quality on Earth. Those same missions will generate the operational and quality data needed to advance toward GMP-compliant and FDA-regulated production in space.

Helogen brings the same orbital manufacturing capabilities demonstrated in October to a new type of material, UCL’s BIO-BONE: a 3D-printed bone substitute built with clinical-grade hydroxyapatite and printed with porosity and mechanical properties that mirror native bone. Microgravity accelerates bone-density loss, creating a fast-acting model of osteoporotic bone. UCL expects a 30-day orbital mission to generate data that would take roughly three years to collect on Earth. The work expands the range of biological materials Helogen can manufacture and sustain in orbit, from artificial retina protein to a living bone analog for testing potential treatments.

“Osteoporosis affects hundreds of millions of people, and there are still no accelerated testing platforms or models for drug development,” said Professor Deepak Kalaskar, UCL Division of Surgery and Interventional Science. “Testing in microgravity lets us model that fragile bone environment far faster than we can on Earth. Working with Helogen gives our team a manufacturing platform capable of culturing and sustaining BIO-BONE in orbit and returning the data we need to move this work toward patients.”

Scaling In-House Manufacturing

Helogen is opening its new Los Angeles manufacturing headquarters to build more of its orbital hardware in-house. Located in Southern California’s aerospace and manufacturing hub, the facility gives the company direct access to engineering and production talent as it expects to considerably scale its team over the coming year.

“Helogen is scaling as fast as demand for orbital manufacturing is growing, and UCL is the latest team to put our platform to work,” said Shishir Bankapur, CEO of Helogen. “A mission almost every other month changes how we have to build. This facility gives us the capacity to build more of the hardware behind every mission in-house at a pace our customers require, here in the center of LA’s aerospace manufacturing base.”

The facility will expand in-house production of HEL-IOS and CELS, dedicated spacecraft, and support the high-power orbital infrastructure that operates them. With eight missions over the next 12 months already planned and the mission manifest expected to grow, bringing more manufacturing under one roof gives Helogen tighter control over how its flight systems are built, tested, and prepared for flight, and the capacity to keep pace as cadence climbs.

About Helogen:

Helogen Corporation is an American company that builds factories in space to manufacture advanced materials and products that are difficult or impossible to make on Earth. The company has flown its own satellite, won NASA’s 2025 TechLeap Prize, and is advancing toward regulated production of space-manufactured biomaterials. Helogen operates its manufacturing and engineering center in Los Angeles and its life sciences laboratory in New York, and is deploying infrastructure in orbit at increasing scale to turn space into a manufacturing hub. For more information, visit www.helogen.com.

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