Yossi Yamin
Yossi Yamin is Cofounder, Chairman, and R&D CEO of SpacePharma, a Swiss-Israeli company that builds miniaturized, fully automated laboratories for pharmaceutical research and manufacturing in microgravity. A retired Lieutenant Colonel who once commanded the Israeli Satellite Unit, he has spent more than a decade turning orbital research into a commercial service for drug developers.
Yossi founded SpacePharma in 2012 and has led it as Owner and Director ever since. Headquartered in Courgenay, Switzerland, with its research and development center in Herzliya, Israel, the company designs remotely controlled lab-on-a-chip and organ-on-a-chip systems weighing about four kilograms that scientists operate in real time from Earth. In 2023, it opened its European office in the incubator of the International Space University in Strasbourg. Read SpacePharma sets up its European headquarters in Strasbourg, Eastern France.
Yossi is the core designer of SPACTORY, a miniaturized space factory intended to produce first-in-class drug crystals and organoids. In August 2024, the project won support from the EIC Accelerator of Horizon Europe, combining a $2.5 million grant with €15 million in contingent equity financing.
Its centerpiece, the MoTi remote-controlled manufacturing unit, is built to fly on any compatible satellite and aims to become the first monoclonal antibody manufacturing facility in space. Crystalline antibody formulations made in microgravity could allow cancer drugs to be given as gradual-release subcutaneous injections instead of intravenous infusions. Read Israeli firm secures major funding for space-age drug.
Under his leadership, SpacePharma launched DIDO-2, a CubeSat built with ISISPACE, aboard an Indian PSLV rocket on February 15, 2017, alongside more than 100 other satellites. The mission validated a miniaturized, end-to-end pharmaceutical laboratory in orbit. Read ISISPACE selected by SpacePharma again to realize their next DIDO mission.
In November 2017, the company's Nexus lab docked at the International Space Station carrying four life-science experiments from Israel, the United States, and Switzerland. Read Israeli Nano-Satellite Docks at International Space Station.
In September 2020, DIDO-3 lifted off on a Vega rocket from Kourou as a joint project of the Israel Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency, hosting four experiments designed by paired Israeli and Italian research teams. Read SpacePharma mini-lab launched in Italy-Israel collaboration.
In April 2022, the SpacePharma ICE Cube flew to the station aboard Axiom Mission 1, Axiom Space's first all-private astronaut mission, hosting studies by Aleph Farms, Amorphical, and CADW Therapeutics on cultivated muscle tissue, bone and muscle cell growth, and DNA damage response. Read SpacePharma launched to the ISS aboard all-private Axiom-1 Mission and SpacePharma sends lab to International Space Station.
In April 2025, the company's 11th laboratory to reach space flew aboard Fram2, the first crewed flight into polar orbit, to accelerate drug crystallization. Read Israel's Space Pharma has launched a mobile laboratory over the poles on a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft.
From 2017 to 2021, SpacePharma was an implementation partner in the Tissue Chips in Space program of the NIH National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences and the ISS National Lab. It supported Lung Host Defense in Microgravity with Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania, and a muscle-wasting tissue chip study led at Sanford Burnham Prebys. Read Series of Human Physiology Projects Selected by NCATS, NIBIB for International Space Station Research.
Earlier, the company won a €906,150 Horizon 2020 SME Instrument award for SPuMP, a miniature pump for remotely controlled fluidic and crystallization experiments on nanosatellites.
Before founding SpacePharma, Yossi served a long career in the Israeli Intelligence Corps, retiring as a Lieutenant Colonel. As commander of the Israeli Satellite Unit, he was responsible for ground station readiness and satellite remote sensing operations.
He also managed large-scale development projects in the United States, Israel, and Canada with companies including BAE Systems, MacDonald Dettwiler, and Israel Aerospace Industries. He conceived SpacePharma in 2012 after meeting visiting NASA leaders and started it in his basement with cofounder Ido Priel. Read The cure is out there: Miniature space labs are leading to scientific breakthroughs.
Yossi earned his BSc in Business Management in 1999 from the University of Phoenix in San Diego, after studying at Palomar College in California between 1996 and 1998. In 2011, he completed the Director's Program at the Leon Recanati Graduate School of Business Administration of Tel Aviv University.
SpacePharma was named a 2018 Red Herring Top 100 North America finalist, won the Health and Medical category of the 2018 Atlas Award, and ranked second in the space category of Fast Company's 2018 Most Innovative Companies. Read Two Swiss scale-ups among the most innovative companies in the world. In September 2025, French bank CIC selected SpacePharma as its first investment choice in a competition at the International Space University, advancing the company to due diligence jointly with the European Investment Bank.
Yossi has spoken at the 13th Ilan Ramon International Space Conference at Tel Aviv University, the XXXI Future Trends Forum of Fundación Bankinter on the commercialization of space, the 2024 webinar Beyond Earth: The Future of Medicine and Biotechnology In Space, and the Longevity Investors Conference 2026 in Gstaad, where he discussed how microgravity can accelerate research on osteoporosis and sarcopenia.
Read Pharmaceutical laboratory in space, Does the future of medicine lie in space?, and SpacePharma's Microgravity Labs Augur Drug Breakthroughs Of The Future. Listen to Episode 13: Yossi Yamin Of Space Pharma, Interview with Yossi Yamin, CEO of SpacePharma, and Pharmacy in Space: How Zero Gravity Finds the Next Cancer Drugs.
Yossi speaks English, Hebrew, and Judeo-Arabic.
Visit his LinkedIn profile and the SpacePharma Wikipedia page. Follow SpacePharma on X.