Canadian biotechnology company Virica Biotech has announced that it will be collaborating with FUJIFILM Biosciences on optimising Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) vector production.
The pair will co-develop an off-the-shelf enhancer-media solution to boost AAV yields and "process robustness" in FUJIFILM Biosciences BalanCD HEK293 system.
Virica added that it is receiving advisory services and funding from the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP), under the Canada-Japan Corporate Co-Innovation Program.
Why this matters
AAV vectors are essential for in vivo gene delivery in gene therapies, but they are still challenging and costly to manufacture at scale.
As development pipelines expand to address more conditions and larger patient populations, there is an increasing demand for high-quality AAV. At the same time, the need for commercially viable therapies puts pressure on production costs.
Current manufacturing methods and their economics often fall short of meeting this demand, creating a bottleneck for the sector.
The collaboration between FUJIFILM Biosciences and Virica aims to enhance AAV productivity significantly by combining high-performance BalanCD media with Virica's VSE enhancers, leading to more robust and scalable manufacturing processes.
Virica stated that it would be working to optimise VSE formulations and process parameters for AAV production in FUJIFILM Biosciences BalanCD HEK293 media with suspension HEK293 cells.
The work will leverage Virica's High-Throughput Virology (HTV) platform, Design-of-Experiments (DoE) frameworks and analytical testing.
FUJIFILM Biosciences will bring its expertise in media and feed supplements, along with its scale-up capabilities, to this collaborative project.
Supported by NRC IRAP, the project aims to create an off-the-shelf enhancer-media combination that end users can then implement with minimal changes to their existing processes.
"We see a strong fit between our VSE technology and FUJIFILM Biosciences BalanCD media portfolio," said Dr Jean-Simon Diallo, Scientific co-founder and CEO of Virica Biotech.
Following the recent launch of our CellVantage-AAV off-the-shelf enhancer, our goal is to provide an optimised formulation to deliver further AAV productivity gains specifically in the FUJIFILM Biosciences BalanCD HEK293 system.
"We remain committed to offering integrated solutions that combine high-performance media with enabling technologies," said Yutaka Yamaguchi, Chair and CEO at FUJIFILM Biosciences.
Optimising Virica's VSE-based enhancers with our FUJIFILM Biosciences BalanCD HEK293 system will help us deliver an easy-to-implement option for improving AAV yields and supporting efficient scale-up for our customers.