Manufacturing recombinant adeno-associated viral vectors from producer cell clones

A commercial rAAV manufacturing process needs to provide a safe product at high yield, be easily scalable, regulatory-compliant, and have reasonable cost of goods. Considerations for process development include not only product quantity and quality, but also ease of obtaining equipment, performing validation, and demonstrating control. In these regards, it is usually efficient to make use of proven technologies for more established areas of manufacturing, such as cell culture and purification methods used by the recombinant protein/monoclonal antibody industry. We have focused on stable mammalian producer cell lines with adenovirus type 5 helper virus as a means of achieving these goals. This review describes our current approach for generating producer cell clones and designing a scalable, regulatory-compliant vector production and purification process that addresses any product safety concerns relating to helper virus. To date, a producer cell line-based manufacturing process has been implemented at the 250-liter production scale, with no foreseeable impediments to scaling up to commercial vector manufacturing in 2000-liter bioreactors or larger.