Explore the Agenda
7:30 am Check-In & Coffee
8:20 am Chair’s Opening Remarks
Overcoming the Economic Hurdle: Building Cost-Effective & Sustainable Vector Manufacturing Systems
8:30 am Breaking the Cost Barrier in Gene Therapy Manufacturing: Rethinking COGs to Enable Sustainable Commercialization
- Discussing why COGs, not efficacy, may be the greatest barrier to gene therapy adoption
- Sharing lessons from current commercial products: what the numbers really tell us about cost, pricing, and scalability
- Identifying high-impact levers for cost reduction across upstream, downstream, and release processes
- Bridging innovation and economics: what types of investment and collaboration are needed to enable sustainable manufacturing
9:00 am From Clinical Runs to Commercial Supply: Scaling AAV Production Without $3 Million Per Dose Costs
- Evaluating how early-stage manufacturing strategies for novel delivery platforms can be adapted for large-scale production without compromising quality or cost
- Exploring how automation, AI-driven design, modular unit operations, and raw material standardization can streamline process transfer and support scalable, reproducible manufacturing across diverse modalities
- Assessing technology transfer and process intensification approaches to enable costefficient, high-yield production for clinical and commercial supply
9:30 am Roundtable Discussion: De-Risking Raw & Starting Material Supply: Building Flexible, Standardized, & Resilient Strategies for Viral Vector Manufacturing
- Extending supply chain risk mapping to strengthen continuity of critical raw and starting materials
- Exploring collaborative inventory models to bridge shortages and prevent delays to batch release and clinical timelines
- Standardizing materials across products to streamline inventory, lower cost and accelerate procurement
10:00 am Morning Break & Speed Networking
As this community reunites for the fourth time, this session will provide valuable networking time with your peers, enabling you to forge new and lasting connections.
Smarter Scaling & Higher Yields to Accelerate the Commercial Readiness of Next-Generation Vector Delivery
11:00 am Advancing Lentiviral Vector Yield, Quality & Commercial Readiness from Transient Transfection Platform to Stable Producer Cell Lines
- A robust lentiviral transient transfection platform delivering high, consistent yields at scale
- Deep analytical profiling of LVV genome integrity and packaging efficiency to drive reliable, high‑quality vector production
- Next‑gen LVV producer cell lines to enable high-volume supply with improved quality and lower COGS
11:30 am Roundtable Discussion: Is Bigger Always Better? Defining the Right Scale to Effectively Balance Yield, Safety & Cost
- Contrasting scalability limitations across vector types and how physical constraints shape commercial strategy
- Discussing trade-offs between driving higher titres versus maintaining potency and how these challenges can differ across vector classes
- Deciding between ‘scaling up’ and ‘scaling out’ and how this can be affected by modality, indication, and regulatory expectation
12:15 pm Lunch Break & Networking
1:15 pm Biosafety Testing: What Characterization is Required in 2026?
Testing requirements for: cell banks, bulk harvesting, drug substance & drug product release
Driving Efficiency & Scalability of Viral Vectors Through Advanced Manufacturing & Process Innovation
1:25 pm Interactive Deep Dive: Emerging Analytical Technologies to Tackle DNA Impurities & Patient Safety Risks: Understanding Regulatory Misalignments & Upstream Process Implication
Following a short presentation, participants will take part in a guided roundtable discussion to share perspectives on defining acceptable impurity limits, aligning analytical methods across sites, and ensuring compliance amid shifting standards. This interactive format aims to foster collaborative learning and actionable takeaways that link analytics, safety, and CMC strategy.
- Linking analytics to safety: Examine how advanced quantification methods (dPCR + NGS) deliver deeper insight into impurity identity, size, and packaging- and what this means for dose safety and consistency
- Understanding regulatory misalignment: Discuss where current impurity thresholds and definitions inherited from biologics or vaccine frameworks fail to align with gene therapy products
- Upstream implications: Identify how analytical findings can inform plasmid design, ratio optimization, cell substrate, and nuclease strategies to proactively reduce impurity burden
2:15 pm The Rise of Modular Manufacturing: Scalable Solutions to Accelerate Novel Therapy Development
- Novel therapeutic development is focused on increasingly individualized solutions, requiring smaller, more customized batches of reagents and buffers to be used across the clinical pipeline as companies scale from research to process development and into commercialization.
- Existing bioprocessing infrastructure was not designed to manufacture these next-generation therapies, forcing the industry to look for research-and-clinical-grade reagent formulations that are easily customizable, scalable, and efficiently manufactured.
- Teknova has been able to leverage their modular manufacturing platform to help novel therapy developers across cell and gene therapy, mRNA, and next-generation antibodies (ADCs and multispecifics) accelerate their breakthroughs to get into the clinical faster.
- Find out more about what criteria novel therapy developers should be considering when evaluating reagent solutions.
2:45 pm Afternoon & Networking Break
3:15 pm Next Generation Column-Free purification of AAV via continuous BioRMB – maximizing product recovery and process productivity
- Introducing BioRMB: the column-free purification platform
- Design of efficient process development: utilization of High Throughputs Screening and Scalability Data
- AAV capture via BioRMB: data for multiple serotypes. 10-20X reduction of resin volume and up to 20% increase in recovery
- Bridging innovation: flexible strategies of working with customers to enable technology adoption
3:45 pm Streamlining AAV Manufacturing with Novel-Plasmid Systems to Reduce Variability, Boost Productivity, & Accelerate Clinical Delivery
- Reducing complexity in upstream workflows: assessing the potential for novel plasmid systems to streamline production
- Presenting insights from Affinia’s adoption of a novel plasmid system – Improving VG titres and reproducibility across capsid serotypes
- Discussing how a novel plasmid system can reduce GMP plasmid demand, simplify raw material supply chains, and lower COGs – directly accelerating time-to-clinic for rare disease programs
- Evaluating potential for scaling up through transfection volume, process timing and control
4:15 pm Session reserved for NanoFCM
4:25 pm Roundtable Discussion: Comparing Manufacturing Paradigms Between AAV & Lentiviral Vectors
- Benchmarking productivity, scalability, and cost-effectiveness between AAV and LV manufacturing systems
- Evaluating upstream strategies: transient transfection vs. stable producer lines and implications for yield and consistency
- Assessing downstream purification challenges: recovery, impurity clearance, and platformability
- Identifying shared analytical standards and CQAs to ensure comparability across vector types