Rhodium Scientific

Rhodium Scientific is a Houston-based space biotechnology company, founded in 2014 by CEO Olivia Gamez Holzhaus, that provides hardware, facility design and mission-support services to academic and commercial researchers running experiments in microgravity. It operates as both an Implementation Partner and a Commercial Service Provider to the ISS National Laboratory, offering a portfolio of NASA-certified, flight-proven hardware including the Rhodium Science Chamber Facility and a Variable Gravity Centrifuge, along with its QuIC Space quality-assurance process for FDA-aligned payload development. The company says it has facilitated more than 35 spaceflight missions to the International Space Station since its founding.

Rhodium's own research record includes a 2022 synthetic cryptobiology study testing bacterial strains engineered to protect DNA through launch, orbital storage and reentry; a 2020 space gut-microbiome investigation run with Los Alamos National Laboratory and funded by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency; a 2020 study of bacteriophage evolution in microgravity; an ongoing space microgreens plant-growth series; and 2023 work testing biomanufacturing concepts aboard the ISS.

The company positions its work across space biotechnology, biomedical research, pharmaceutical development and agricultural bioscience, with the stated goal of translating space-based discoveries into terrestrial healthcare and national-security applications.

As an ISS National Lab Implementation Partner, Rhodium supports other companies' and universities' payloads rather than only running its own experiments, putting it in the same commercial-service-provider category as larger players such as BioServe and Space Tango. It remains privately held and has not disclosed funding figures.