Asimov, the synthetic biology company advancing the design and manufacture of therapeutics announced the launch of their LV Edge Packaging System, which improves the cost efficiency and reduces the supply chain risk of lentiviral production. The ready-to-transfer system minimizes GMP plasmid cost, process complexity, and supply chain risk by stably integrating viral genes into the host cell. This enables lentiviral production from a single-plasmid transfection, in contrast to the standard four-plasmid process
In lentiviral manufacturing, GMP plasmids account for a substantial proportion of raw material costs. Procurement of these plasmids also introduces additional supply chain risk and process complexity, which can impact both timelines and product variability. By removing the need to transiently transfect three out of the four GMP plasmids, the LV Edge Packaging System reduces manufacturing cost and supply chain risk without compromising speed to market.
The LV Edge Packaging System achieves high harvest titers of over 1E8 TU/mL across multiple chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) transgenes and enables tuneable transgene expression in the transduced cell. The system consists of: (1) A clonal, suspension-adapted packaging cell line with stably-integrated lentiviral genes under inducible control, (2) Model-guided DNA design to optimize transgene expression – powered by Kernel, Asimov’s computer-aided design (CAD) software, and (3) Robust, ready-to-transfer processes and protocols across multiple scales.
“We’re excited to announce the launch of LV Edge, a significant leap toward solving the challenges of lentiviral manufacturing,” said Alec Nielsen, co-founder and CEO of Asimov. “By marrying mammalian synthetic biology, cutting-edge predictive models, and flexible computer-aided design software, the LV Edge Packaging System is the first of multiple planned offerings to enable cell and gene therapy developers. Later this year, we will expand the LV Edge offering with a fully-stable lentiviral producer cell line development service, unlocking even greater scalability and cost reduction. This system builds on the success of our CHO Edge system for advanced antibody production, deepening our commitment to democratize the state of the art in genetic design capabilities to our partners.”