Large Scale Transient Transfection For The Production Of Lentiviral Vectors Using The Corning® HYPERStack® Cell Culture Vessel

By Tao Xiaofan and Chen Rui, Corning Incorporated

Lentiviral vectors (LVs) have been successfully used in clinical treatments where they have been demonstrated to be safe and effective for gene transfer in cell and gene therapy applications. Overall, the market for LV production is predicted to grow to $800 million by 20262 as a result of its popularity in clinical trials and the market approval of recent CAR-T therapies Kymriah and Yescarta. T cells that are designed to express chimeric antigen receptors or epitope-specific transgenic T cell receptors are currently being investigated in multiple cancer immunotherapy clinical trials worldwide. As the use of LVs in new therapies has increased, so has the need for technologies that can help scale up their manufacture.

The large-scale production of LVs is currently generally achieved by directly amplifying small-scale production methods, for example by expanding the cultivation surface area by adding supplementary cultivation/production units or “scaling out”.

In this LV production study, we employed the Corning HYPERStack cell culture vessel, which features Corning’s proprietary High Yield PERformance (HYPER) technology to reduce the air space within the vessel and achieve higher yield per volume of space compared to traditional stacked layer cell culture vessels. The Corning HYPERStack vessel was compared with traditional culture vessels, revealing that the HYPERStack vessel can produce a superior LV titer.