There are several articles investigating the use of baculovirus vectors for LV production in suspension lines. What do you think about this approach?

Answer

While we’ve heard of using such for AAV production, we’ve not seen anyone using insect cells for LV production. As both LV and baculovirus produce budded viruses, I would think using such for LV production would result in low titers (if any) due to competition of cellular secretion and assembly factors. For AAV production, the use of insect cells is well documented with several therapeutic AAV’s now in the clinic. The insect cell system has the advantages of being able to grow cells in suspension culture and no need to produce costly plasmids or use transient transfection reagents. However, one now has to demonstrate removal of the large baculoviruses that were used to infect the culture (though size exclusion is relatively straightforward) and there have been some reports of post translational modifications and differences of the capsids can result in different transduction efficiencies when applied to target cells/organs.