Bioprocessing of Viral Vaccines

Amine Kamen is a professor of bioengineering at McGill University, and Canada Research Chair in bioprocessing of viral vaccines. He is a researcher emeritus of the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) where he was employed until early 2014, as head of the Process Development section of the Human Health Therapeutics Portfolio. At NRC, he established one of North America’s largest and most advanced governmental centers for animal cell culture addressing process development and scale-up of biologics. Also, he developed with his team and licensed to industry multiple technology platforms for efficient manufacturing of recombinant proteins and viral vectors and vaccines and led technology transfer to manufacturing sites for clinical evaluation and commercialization. His current research activities focus on uncovering mechanisms associated with cell production of viral vectors and viral vaccines, cell and metabolic engineering, process control and monitoring, and process analytical technologies of high-yield productions of viral vectors for gene delivery and vaccination. He has published over 170 papers in refereed international journals and acts as a consultant for several national and international private and public organizations. Laura Cervera is a Chemical Engineer from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Barcelona, Spain). After graduating she did her PhD in Biotechnology on the topic “Strategies for improving production levels of HIV-1 VLPs by transient transfection of HEK 293 suspension cultures”. Then she moved to McGillUniversity (Montreal, Canada) to pursue her research on VLP production, this time using Insect cells as a platform. She came back to Barcelona to join a project on AAV production for gene therapy applications using HEK 293 cells.

1. Bioprocessing of viral vaccines-Introduction. 2. Introduction to Virology. 3. Principles of immunology. 4. Cell lines for vaccine production. 5. Upstream Processing for Viral Vaccines – General Aspects. 6. Upstream Processing for Viral Vaccines - Process Intensification. 7. Downstream Processing of Viral Vaccines. 8. Analytical, QbD and PAT Applied to Viral Production Processes. 9. Manufacturing of seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccines - a case study. 10. Recombinant vaccines: Gag-based VLPs. 11. Vectored Vaccines. 12. Design and Production of Vaccines Against COVID-19 using Established Vaccine Platforms.