Bioprocessing of Viral Vaccines

Amine Kamen is a professor of bioengineering at McGill University, and Canada

Research Chair in bioprocessing of viral vaccines. He is a researcher emeritus of the

National Research Council of Canada (NRC) where he was employed until early

2014, as head of the Process Development section of the Human Health Therapeutics

Portfolio. At NRC, he established one of North America's largest and most advanced

governmental centers for animal cell culture addressing process development and

scale-up of biologics. Also, he developed with his team and licensed to industry

multiple technology platforms for efficient manufacturing of recombinant proteins

and viral vectors and vaccines and led technology transfer to manufacturing sites for

clinical evaluation and commercialization. His current research activities focus on

uncovering mechanisms associated with cell production of viral vectors and viral

vaccines, cell and metabolic engineering, process control and monitoring, and process

analytical technologies of high-yield productions of viral vectors for gene delivery

and vaccination. He has published over 170 papers in refereed international journals

and acts as a consultant for several national and international private and public

organizations.

Laura Cervera is a Chemical Engineer from Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona

(Barcelona, Spain). After graduating she did her PhD in Biotechnology on the topic

"Strategies for improving production levels of HIV-1 VLPs by transient transfection

of HEK 293 suspension cultures". Then she moved to McGillUniversity (Montreal,

Canada) to pursue her research on VLP production, this time using Insect cells as a

platform. She came back to Barcelona to join a project on AAV production for gene

therapy applications using HEK 293 cells.