Vaccines: Recombinant Adenovirus

Adenoviruses are non-enveloped icosahedral virus particles. In the developing field of gene therapy recombinant adenovirus has been used as one of the most successful means of delivering genes of interest into target cells. As with any other biopharmaceutical, it is crucial to characterize the manufactured recombinant adenovirus in terms of its size distribution, aggregation, and chemical potency (such as concentration in terms of absolute virus particle counts per unit volume).

Because of the large size of adenovirus, SEC is not appropriate for providing information on the size distribution and aggregation of this virus. In this application note we report the results, in collaboration with the scientists at Biogen, of characterizing adenovirus particles using the Eclipse^™ field flow fractionator (FFF) equipped with the DAWN^® multi-angle light scattering (MALS) detector.