The Science is There: Key Considerations for Stabilizing Viral Vector-Based Covid-19 Vaccines.

Once Covid-19 vaccines become available, 5-10 billion vaccine doses should be globally distributed, stored and administered. In this commentary, we discuss how this enormous challenge could be addressed for viral vector-based Covid-19 vaccines by learning from the wealth of formulation development experience gained over the years on stability issues related to live attenuated virus vaccines and viral vector vaccines for other diseases. This experience has led -over time- to major improvements on storage temperature, shelf-life and in-use stability requirements.

Report of the international conference on manufacturing and testing of pluripotent stem cells.

Sessions included an overview of past cell therapy (CT) conferences sponsored by the International Alliance for Biological Standardization (IABS). The sessions highlighted challenges in the field of human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) and also addressed specific points on manufacturing, bioanalytics and comparability, tumorigenicity testing, storage, and shipping. Panel discussions complemented the presentations.

Industry view on the relative importance of "clonality" of biopharmaceutical-producing cell lines.

Recently, several health authorities have requested substantial detail from sponsor firms regarding the practices employed to generate the production cell line for recombinant DNA-(rDNA) derived biopharmaceuticals. Two possible inferences from these regulatory agency questions are that (1) assurance of "clonality" of the production cell line is of major importance to assessing the safety and efficacy of the product and (2), without adequate proof of "clonality", additional studies of the cell line and product are often required to further ensure the product's purity and homogeneity. Here we address the topic of "clonality" in the broader context of product quality assurance by current technologies and practices, as well as discuss some of the relevant science and historical perspective.