Capture of cell culture-derived influenza virus by lectins : strain independent, but host cell dependent

Influenza infection is a wide spread disease of the respiratory tract. Strategies to control influenza outbreaks are mainly focused on prophylactic vaccination. Commonly available human influenza vaccines are trivalent blends. Therefore and due to annual adaptations, strain independent manufacturing processes are required for vaccine production. This study verifies the strain independency of a capturing method based on Euonymus europaeus lectin-affinity chromatography (EEL-AC) for downstream processing of influenza viruses propagated in MDCK cells under various culture conditions. Therefore, a comprehensive lectin binding screening was conducted for two influenza virus types from season 2007/2008 (A/Wisconsin/67/2005, B/Malaysia/2506/2004) including a comparison of virus lectin association by surface plasmon resonance technology. EEL-AC resulted in a reproducible high product recovery rate and a high degree of contaminant removal in the case of both MDCK cell-derived influenza virus types clearly demonstrating the general applicability of EEL-AC. In addition, differences in virus purification based on host cell selection were studied for MDCK and Vero cells, which are considered for industrial vaccine production. However, the choice of the host cell lines is known to lead to differences in product glycosylation profiles. Hence, altered lectin specificities have been observed between the two cell lines, requiring process adaptations between different influenza vaccine production systems. Copyright © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. [accessed 2008 October 29th