Commercial-scale manufacture of lentivirus for ex vivo and in vivo therapies

Rachel has more than 25 years of experience in the field of scalable biologics and gene therapy manufacturing of therapeutic products, viral vectors and proteins for gene therapy and biologics. She completed her Ph.D. in Food Engineering and Biotechnology at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Israel. Rachel joined Repligen in 2021 as a subject matter expert leading the global gene therapy organization helping customers achieve their technical and operational objectives in their manufacturing of vector-based therapeutics and vaccines with a focus on gene therapy processes including upstream, downstream, analytics and scalability. In addition to supporting global customers and building high level networks, Rachel is supporting various internal cross-functional activities and external collaborations. Prior to joining Repligen, Rachel held several scientific and leadership roles at Microbiology and Molecular Genetics department at Harvard Medical School, CRO SBH Sciences, Seahorse Biosciences part of Agilent, CDMO Goodwin Biotechnology and Pall Corp part of Danaher.

Michelle is a researcher with experience in cell culture engineering, purification techniques, and functional characterization and analytics for viral vectors and recombinant proteins. She completed her PhD in Biological and Biomedical Engineering under the supervision of Dr. Amine Kamen in the Viral Vectors and Vaccines Bioprocessing group at McGill University. Her PhD project focused on process intensification strategies that contribute to increasing the production of lentiviral vectors in HEK293 suspension cells at large-scale while mitigating the loss of functionality. Prior to her graduate program, Michelle developed scalable purification methods for therapeutic recombinant enzymes from CHO cells and gene therapy vectors from Adeno-Associated Viruses in the Purification Process Development group at BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc.