Taking the Pain out of Viral Vector Production

Viral vector-mediated gene therapies have taken on incredible importance in basic research, drug discovery, and clinical trials. While viral vectors, especially adeno-associated viruses (AAV), are an exciting delivery method for gene therapies and drug discovery, their development and production require lengthy workflows that has so far prevented them from reaching their mainstream potential.

Producing a viral vector requires much more than simple cell culture, transfection, and harvesting your viral vector. There are several downstream production steps needed to capture and purify the viral vector after it is harvested from cell culture—these steps add up to a lengthy workflow with numerous challenges.

These pain points start with low yields of capsids full of therapeutic DNA. Recovering the full capsids then requires an often inefficient, multi-step purification process. Performing analytical testing of the purified product also requires sophisticated testing methods. These need to be adapted for each different viral vector drug substance. Product purification and testing require large amounts of manual data analysis, which further slows down the process. On top of this, the workflow can be difficult to scale up and provides poor data traceability between multiple development and production sites.. As data across labs and partners needs to be tracked closely, this can be a hindrance to rapid commercialization.

Fortunately, there are solutions that can soothe some of these pain points, including products and solutions from the Life Sciences companies of Danaher. SCIEX offers numerous analytical solutions including the ZenoTOF 7600 System, which can streamline product LC-MS analyses and provide greater insight into peptide mapping of rAAV capsid proteins. IDBS Polar Biopharma Lifecycle Management software provides data science services that remove the burden of extensive manual data processing from this workflow and expedite drug development. The Life Sciences companies of Danaher’s end-to-end solutions enable researchers to seamlessly integrate their workflows—and gain access to a global team of trusted experts and customer support. To learn more, get in touch with us today.