Kyle Acierno, chief executive officer of Exobiosphere, presents his company’s mission to revolutionise drug discovery through microgravity research using robotic lab systems. He discusses Luxembourg’s supportive ecosystem and outlines the company’s orbital and terrestrial growth plans.
Can you present your company in a few words?
Exobiosphere is a Luxembourg based company that builds compact, robotic lab systems to accelerate drug discovery in microgravity. We miniaturize and automate standard laboratory processes—like liquid handling and cell culture—into small, self-contained platforms that can be launched into orbit. In space, biology behaves differently: diseases can appear faster, cell interactions are more pronounced, and we gain clearer insights that are tough to capture on Earth. This helps pharmaceutical and biotech researchers cut development times and costs while improving success rates. Beyond pharma, our technology also has applications for commercial entities and government partners, including the Department of Defense, which values robust, cost-effective, and miniaturized solutions. By merging robotics, engineering, and biomedical expertise, Exobiosphere is making research feasible, scalable, and directly relevant to real-world therapeutic development and national security and commercial needs.
How can Luxembourg’s ecosystem help you grow?
Luxembourg offers a supportive blend of forward-thinking space policies, funding opportunities, world-class talent and readily available partnerships that help us move faster. The Luxembourg Space Agency stands out for connecting emerging ventures like ours with grants, technical expertise, and a robust network of peers in the aerospace sector. Beyond space, Luxembourg’s established finance and biotech communities create a thriving ecosystem where we can tap into a variety of investment sources and potential collaborators. The business-friendly House of Biohealth made it easier to open labs, hire talent, and establish collaborations with both local and international firms. This environment ultimately shortens our learning curve and de-risks our expansion. As we continue to refine our orbital platform for drug discovery the Luxembourg ecosystem gives us the runway we need to innovate and scale quickly.
“In space, biology behaves differently.”
How do you see your company evolving in the next 2 years?
Over the next two years, our main goal is to broaden our orbital research capabilities and expand into ‘terrestrial’ markets. We aim to move from a single experimental platform to multiple payloads operating on various space stations. This scaling will allow us to serve multiple pharmaceutical and biotech clients at once, generating far more data to accelerate R&D. On the technical front, we’re enhancing our robotics and analytics tools, so we can run increasingly complex experiments in microgravity—from multi-stage drug screens to advanced cosmetic formulations. Simultaneously, we’ll be growing our customer pipeline across pharma, biotech, and beauty, and integrating feedback from these early missions to refine our processes. By 2025–2026, we expect to be a go-to resource for organizations seeking faster, more reliable insights from orbital research. Our work will expand into miniaturized labs that can be used on Earth for both commercial and defense purposes.
