Quantifying the titer and quality of adenovirus stocks.

The broad application of recombinant adenoviruses to the development of vaccines and gene therapy vectors has encouraged the development of molecular assays for the facile quantitation of adenoviral particles and the assignment of their infectious potency. The Genome Quantitation Assay (GQA) and the QPCR-Based Potency Assay (QPA) developed for adenoviruses offer the attributes of precision, rapidity, and high throughput either performed manually or facilitated by simple automated liquid handling systems. These assay attributes allow for accelerated process development support and product characterization and release. The assays for adenovirus could offer the additional advantage in that their quantitation is based on viral replication independent of cytopathology permitting quantitation of serotypes that cause minimal cytopathic effect (CPE) in 293 cells and specificity that allows the components of multivalent vaccines to be discriminated and quantitated for release.

Using QPCR to assign infectious potencies to adenovirus based vaccines and vectors for gene therapy: toward a universal method for the facile quantitation of virus and vector potency.

The assignment of infectious potency to test articles of adenovirus has been conducted mainly using classical end-point dilution methods, which rely on virus induced cytopathology to reveal the presence of infectious virus. These assays suffer the disadvantages of labor intensity, duration, throughput restriction and variability. In the course of our development of an Ad5 based HIV vaccine for clinical evaluation, we sought a facile method for the assignment of potency to the numerous test articles generated during the development of bioprocesses for bulk manufacture, downstream purification and formulation. In this paper we describe a quantitative PCR based potency assay (QPA) which uses QPCR to quantitate adenovirus genomes replicated 24h after the inoculation of a test article on 293 cell monolayers, and then relates that mass to potency by interpolation to a standard curve of replicated adenovirus genomes constructed with a reference adenovirus standard to which infectious potency has been previously assigned in the classical end-point dilution assay. The QPA assay for adenovirus is simple and rapid, with a throughput capacity adequate to the potency assay demands of bioprocess development, and with a precision expressed as a root variability of 16.8% R.S.D., allowing for close discriminations of the products of alternative process configurations. The adenovirus QPA principle can be applied to the quantitation of infectious potency of both RNA and DNA viruses and we report briefly on the development of QPA assays for measles and mumps. QPA assays owing to their simplicity and easy automation, rapidity, capacity and precision hold promise to become widely practiced methods for the quantitation of the potency of live virus vaccines and other recombinant virus vectors.