Today Zero Gravity Works begins its incubation at the ESA Business Incubation Centre Milan, managed by TEF Bridge. The programme opened this morning with a kick-off at Politecnico di Milano's Bovisa campus, and will accompany the company for the next twenty-four months.
ESA Business Incubation Centres are the European Space Agency's programme for turning space technology into business — the largest network of incubators supporting space-related start-ups in Europe, with more than 2,000 companies supported to date. ESA BIC Milan operates within the Politecnico di Milano innovation ecosystem.
For Zero Gravity Works, incubation backs the engineering groundwork of our orbital platform: the preliminary design and feasibility of our autonomous crystallisation module, and the ruggedisation study for the optical instrumentation that lets the module monitor crystal growth in orbit. Alongside the technical work, the programme brings business, funding-readiness and intellectual-property support, and structured access to Politecnico di Milano's aerospace engineering expertise.
"Pharmaceutical manufacturing in orbit is being invented right now, and Europe has every ingredient to lead it," said Gian Luca Petrelli, founder and CEO of Zero Gravity Works. "Starting our incubation at ESA BIC Milan gives us the engineering depth and the institutional backing to move from feasibility towards flight."
Our thanks to the TEF Bridge team for getting us to this point, and to our partners at Politecnico di Milano and the University of Pavia.
Zero Gravity Works is participating in the ESA Business Incubation Centre Milan.