Driving significant AAV process yield and quality improvements for systemic delivery

Rahul Chelikani obtained a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Andhra University in Visakhapatnam, India and a PhD in chemical engineering from The University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA. After his PhD program, he started his career as an upstream process development scientist at Novavax, USA, working on the development of a bioreactor process for virus like particle (VLP) based vaccines. Then he moved onto a role in the bioprocess development division at Shire (Now Takeda) and worked extensively on development and scale up of batch and perfusion processes for different drug modalities (recombinant enzymes, monoclonal antibodies, fusion proteins, and AAV vectors). In his current role at Vertex Cell and Gene Therapies, he leads a team of scientists and engineers to develop a platform process to produce AAV vectors with significantly higher productivity by evaluating new basal media, transfection conditions & reagents, bioreactor parameters and novel cell lines. He has extensive experience in mammalian cell culture, media formulation development, high throughput platform development, scale up/scale down and tech transfer of single use bioreactor processes.

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