October 2023 Featured Report

Despite rapid progress, significant obstacles remain for viral-vector manufacturing, including the need for effective separation of full and empty viral capsids. Optimizing that step is difficult but critical to achieving good yields of functional vectors. The biopharmaceutical industry has rapidly developed enhanced resins, matrices, and methods for such processes. As this author from EnVision Instruments explains, dual-channel, in-line photometers based on modern UV-LED light sources provide a powerful tool for process scientists working to address current limitations. He highlights the limitations of traditional mercury-vapor UV light sources — from unwieldy size to high power draw and the tendency to cause sensor drift — before describing the alternative that light-emitting diodes present. Narrow-bandwidth LEDs centered at or near the wavelengths of interest help analysts by overcoming the key limitation of legacy UV-filter photometers, and they are less resource intensive and operate in a smaller foo...

Although chemical synthesis enables production of modified DNA products at manufacturing scales that cannot be achieved using enzymatic technology, the latter offers benefits related to sustainability and flexibility. Enzymatic synthesis should be able to make longer sequences than can be made through using chemical methods. Biological synthesis has been used for many years to obtain micrograms to kilograms of nucleic acids (e.g., of double-stranded circular DNA plasmids). Methods based on phage systems can make linear and circular single-stranded DNA in bacterial fermentation. For applications requiring large amounts of unmodified DNA, that approach could be both efficient and cost-effective. As the chief scientific officer of genomics company Integrated DNA Technologies points out in this brief discussion, quality control is important no matter what method of production is used.