TESSA technology: A new era for AAV manufacture

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The gene therapy industry has benefitted from exciting biological advances in recent years, fuelling an ever-growing desire to ensure that more patients can benefit from these novel treatments. However, for these treatments to become widely available, manufacturing systems must keep pace with biological advances. Lack of novel manufacturing systems leave gene therapies costly, difficult to produce at scale, and subject to batch-to-batch variability.

One significant challenge comes in the manufacturing of AAV, a popular choice of viral vector to deliver new gene therapies. AAV is typically manufactured using plasmids, which are limited in efficiency and scalability. In this webinar, Dr Ryan Cawood describes how OXGENE’s plasmid free TESSA™ technology brings ‘a new era for AAV manufacture’ by manipulating the adenoviral lifecycle to provide wild type levels of adenoviral help for AAV production, without subsequent high levels of contamination.

TESSA™ vectors directly encode the genetic material required for AAV production, removing the need for plasmids to perform that function. These vectors take advantage of the dual phases of the adenoviral lifecycle to produce AAV, while limiting adenoviral contamination. Early phase adenoviral gene expression provides help for high titre AAV manufacture, while late phase gene expression, responsible for adenovirus contamination, is switched off. This increases rAAV yield, packaging efficiency and infectivity compared with plasmid based rAAV manufacture, and represses adenovirus production by 99.99999%. TESSA™ technology is fully scalable and is ideally suited for rapid and continuous production of GMP quality AAV, reducing the potential for batch-to-batch variation. Ultimately, TESSA™ technology will result in improved cost of goods and improved safety of gene therapies.

• There are significant challenges with manufacturing AAV in a cost-effective and large-scale way using plasmid-based approaches.
• TESSA™ vectors offer a scalable, plasmid free solution for AAV manufacturing.
• TESSA™ vectors significantly improve AAV yields compared with other methods.
• Large-scale GMP manufacturing is possible with TESSA™ vectors.

Ryan Cawood

Chief Scientific Officer at OXGENE

Ryan founded Oxford Genetics in 2011, after earning a first class degree in genetics and a PhD from Oxford University. The idea behind the company was to simplify and standardise the process of DNA engineering using a proprietary DNA plasmid platform called SnapFast™ that allowed researchers – for the first time – to assemble complex sections of DNA as simply as ‘molecular Lego’. Ryan used his background in genetic engineering and virology to guide and grow the business through a series of strategic changes that explored how further development of the SnapFast™ platform through in house research and development could help overcome multiple challenges in the development of new biologics. 
This culminated in a rebrand to OXGENE in 2019, as the company redefined itself as a leading solutions provider, using a combination of proprietary technologies to address multiple pinch-points on the journey through design, discovery, development and manufacture of a novel biologic.

Watch now

SPEAKERS

Ryan Cawood

Chief Scientific Officer at OXGENE

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