Pre-conference Course

ANIMAL CELL TECHNOLOGY IN A NUTSHELL: A PRIMER FOR CURRENT AND EMERGING TRENDS

Saturday 22 June 2024, Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC); 10:00 – 18:30

This short course is meant for newcomers to the field and especially for those wishing to broaden their understanding of areas slightly outside their current knowledge. You may, for example, wish to rapidly extend your knowledge from recombinant protein manufacture to understanding of viral vector manufacture. Your background may be from a very different field and you need to gain a rapid knowledge of the principles that underpin success for manufacture of a range of biological therapeutics. This is ideal for technology developers and product exhibitors coming from distinct fields who are now involved in marketing cell culture technology related products. This will be a day of intensive training, information transmission and guidance on areas of interest in the field of Animal Cell Technology (ACT) and its application, delivered by expert communicators. The format is designed to help attendees gain maximum value from talks, posters and networking at the ESACT meeting that will immediately follow this course and additionally provide long-lasting deeper insights into the purpose and use of different tools, instruments and techniques within the industrial and academic ACT sector. It is intended that participants will not be experts across the overall field but some general understanding of the processes used for production and manufacture of biologics (recombinant proteins, viral and gene vectors, cell therapies, nucleic acids) would be advantageous. Informal discussions with the organisers are recommended for any potential participants who are uncertain about their suitability for attendance.

Programme

Time
10:00	Standard Cell Lines and cell line development Nicole Borth, BOKU University What are animal cells and why do we use them?
10:40	Industrial Manufacturing of therapeutic proteins using ACT Anne Tolstrup, ABTBioConsult Types of proteins, manufacturing scales, challenges in large scale production
11:20	Coffee break and networking
12:00	ACT for Cell and Gene Therapies Emma Petiot, Universite de Lyon Overview of the cell and gene therapies (Stem cells, CAR-T cells, tissue regeneration, rare diseases) and discussion on these process’s challenges (scalability, vector immunogenicity, cell sources and conservation of stem properties, patient specificities / reproducibility, final product quality).
12:40	Open questions and discussion
13:30	Lunch break and networking
15:00	ACT for Vaccines Amine Kamen, McGill University, Canada The session will briefly review the types of vaccination modalities and recent advances in vaccinology. Current vaccines on the market will be discussed and biomanufacturing platforms assessed in the context of pandemic preparedness. Specific challenges related to production of vectored vaccines, VLPs, lipid nanoparticles and mRNAs technologies will be compared.
15:40	Bioprocess Engineering and manufacturing Bernhard Sissolak, Bilfinger Life Sciences This session will focus in the first part on integrated continuous biomanufacturing, its impact and the challenges it brings in process development. And secondly, how pharma processes are now driving the sustainable food production forward.
16:20	Coffee break and networking
17:00	Mathematical models as enablers for bioprocess optimisation Ioscani Jimenez del Val, UCD Overview of how mathematical models can be used to optimise upstream pharmaceutical bioprocesses, starting from specific aspects such as modelling metabolism and the glycosylation process, culminating in overall upstream bioprocess models that integrate cellular growth, productivity, and product quality.
17:40	Open questions and discussion “Pubquiz” on afternoon session Overall discussion and wrap-up
18:30	Close