Latest developments in the large-scale production of adeno-associated virus vectors in insect cells toward the treatment of neuromuscular diseases

Arbovirus vaccines; opportunities for the baculovirus-insect cell expression system

“…Potential drawbacks of the baculovirus-insect cell system include its lytic nature and the fact that, in the case of human vaccines, budded baculoviruses must be separated from the produced subunits or VLPs. New technologies (Marek et al, 2011) are currently in development to address the latter problem (Galibert and Merten, 2011).…”

Opportunities and challenges for the baculovirus expression system

“…The baculovirus-expression system is also a promising system to produce viral vectors for gene therapy, mainly adeno-associate virus (AAV) vectors, using a co-infection of three baculovirus vectors (Urabe et al, 2002) and lentiviral vectors (Lesch et al, 2008). See also Galibert andLesch et al (2011).…”

Quality control and analytical methods for baculovirus-based products

“…In a different study, the production of two Rep proteins (Rep 78 and 52) and subsequently the stability of recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) vectors in the rBac/insect cell system was significantly improved using a single coding sequence for both proteins wherein the initiator codon for the Rep78 protein is suboptimal (WO2007/148971). With this strategy, the Rep78 protein initiator codon is partially skipped by the scanning ribosomes, thus allowing translation to also occur further downstream at the initiation codon of the Rep52 protein (see Galibert and Merten, 2011). The stability of the rAAV vectors was assessed by western blot and quantitative PCR (qPCR).…”

“…The rBac/insect cell system can also be used for virus production, including genetically modified rBac and adeno-associated viruses (Urabe et al, 2002;Vicente et al, 2009b) (Galibert and Merten, 2011). Applications of rBac go from high-throughput screening of gene functions (Gao et al, 2003) to drug delivery (Parry et al, 1999), in vitro assembly studies, design of antiviral drugs (Fromentin et al, 2007) or bio-weapons (Artenstein and Grabenstein, 2008).…”