Next Generation Plasmid Technology: Improving Performance, Safety, And Manufacturing For Today's Therapies

The cell and gene therapy industry has been using the same plasmid technology for decades.¹ Initially limited to research, global demand has grown to keep pace with the rise in cell and gene applications and COVID-19 vaccine production. However, efforts to ramp up the production of high-quality and safe plasmid DNA (pDNA) have brought the fundamental challenges of this technology into focus.² The fermentation and purification methods used in plasmid production are slow, costly and difficult to scale. At the same time, incorporation and transmission of antibiotic resistance genes is a significant concern.³

While typical plasmids contain bacterial backbones greater than 2000 bp and antibiotic resistance markers, smaller backbones increase expression⁴ and durability and reduce the cell-transfection-associated toxicity and transgene silencing that can occur with larger amounts of DNA.^5,6,7,8 Therefore, with small backbones and no antibiotic markers, Nanoplasmid™ vectors have proven to be transformative replacements in a wide variety of applications, offering greater safety and efficiency than traditional plasmids.

The proprietary Nanoplasmid vector has been used successfully by many major biotech and pharma companies to develop the next advanced therapies currently in clinical trials. With enhanced manufacturing production and improving plasmid performance, Nanoplasmids have paved the way for facilitating a wide range of cell and gene therapeutic applications, including transposon and CRISPR HDR template vectors, non-viral gene therapies and DNA vaccines, and lentiviral and AAV vectors. This paper provides an overview of the Nanoplasmid technology and highlights its specific benefits for various applications with case examples from recent publications.