JOINT WEBINAR

Takeda, PathoQuest & Charles River Laboratories

Adventitious Agent Testing For MMV:

How Much Do We Really Know?

01st October 2024

10:00am EDT / 7:00am PDT / 3:00pm BST / 4:00pm CEST

Presented by:

Maria Farcet, Head of Cell Culture, Virus Models & Serology in the Global Pathogen Safety /

Global Quality Team at Takeda

featuring

Amina Cherif Louazani, Ph.D., Viral Safety Manager at PathoQuest

and

Dr. Denise Teber, Scientific Expert of the PCR department at Charles River Laboratories

Minute virus of mice (MMV) has contaminated biotechnological processes in the past, making specific MMV testing recommended if the production cell line is known to be permissive for this virus. Testing is widely done using cell-culture based adventitious virus assays, yet MMV strains may differ in their in vitro cell tropism. Here, I present growth characteristics of different MMV strains on A9 and 324K cells and identified significant differences in susceptibility of these widely used indicator cell lines to infection by different strains of MMV, which has implications for MMV detectability during routine testing of biotechnology process harvests[1].

An MMV specific PCR was evaluated as a more encompassing method and was shown as a suitable replacement for cell culture-based detection of the different MMV strains. This method not only provides more rapid detection but also covers other rodent parvoviruses that might contaminate biotechnological processes. Although no MMV contamination event of human-derived cell lines has been reported in the past, biotechnological processes that use these lines, such as HEK293, commonly used in biopharmaceutical manufacturing, also need to consider MMV-specific testing as we showed them to be susceptible to productive MMV infection.

[1] Farcet et al., Biotechnology & Bioengineering 2024; 121:131-138; DOI: 10.1002/bit.28573