Accelerating Lentivirus Manufacturing: An engineering-driven approach

Abstract

The journey of Advanced Therapy Medicinal Products (ATMPs) has come a long way in the last few decades, as is reflected in the increasing number of clinical trials conducted every year. Particularly, in the field of gene therapy, they have achieved promising results and almost 40 cell and gene therapy products already in the market. In 2019, the approval of Kymriah, a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR-T) for the treatment of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, sparked the attention to Lentiviral vectors (LVs). In the following years, LVs have become one of the workhorses for the treatment of monogenic disorders and adoptive cell therapies with seven LVs-based products launched on the market. In fact, LVs are a remarkable subclass of the Retroviridae family, with the ability to integrate the genome of proliferating and non-proliferating cells and presenting lower Insertional mutagenesis when compared with γ-retrovirus.