Presented by: Maria Patrício, lead scientist for viral design and discovery, Oxgene, a WuXi Advanced Therapies company Building upon colleague Jason King’s BPI Theater presentation on transient transfection platforms for viral-vector production, Patrício focused on scalable manufacturing solutions for adenoassociated virus (AAV), the vector used most often to deliver gene therapies. AAV naturally requires a helper virus to replicate. Plasmid transfection enables helper-free manufacture, but that process is difficult to manage at commercial scales. A more scalable approach is to…

Presented by: Evan Zynda, staff scientist, Thermo Fisher Scientific Cell therapy companies increasingly are pursuing allogeneic therapies to negotiate manufacturing challenges associated with autologous approaches. Products based on high-quality cells from healthy donors could improve therapeutic efficacy. Allogeneic approaches also could facilitate large-scale therapy production, which in turn could reduce time-to-treatment and increase therapy affordability and accessibility. Zynda showed how increased understanding of T-cell biology could help improve allogeneic workflows. Zynda emphasized the utility of studying signaling pathways associated with…

Presented by: Jason King, business development manager, Oxgene, a WuXi Advanced Therapies company Since joining the WuXi Advanced Therapies division of WuXi AppTec in March 2021, Oxgene has focused on helping gene therapy developers to optimize their viralvector production systems as they transition from preclinical and early clinical projects to good manufacturing practice (GMP)-grade manufacturing. King observed that early stages of gene therapy development nearly always involve systems for transient transfection rather than scalable platforms. Inducible producer cell lines, viral…