Adventitious Agent Testing For MMV: How Much Do We Really Know - ERP Spain.com - España y América Latina

Minute virus of mice (MMV) has contaminated biotechnological processes in the past and specific MMV testing is therefore recommended, if the production cell line is known to be permissive for this virus. Testing is widely done using cell-culture based adventitious virus assays, yet MMV strains may differ in their in vitro cell tropism. Here, I present growth characteristics of different MMV strains on A9 and 324K cells and identified significant differences in susceptibility of these widely used indicator cell lines to infection by different strains of MMV, which has implications for MMV detectability during routine testing of biotechnology process harvests [1]. An MMV specific PCR was evaluated as a more encompassing method and was shown as suitable replacement for cell culture-based detection of the different MMV strains, with the additional benefit that detection is more rapid and does also cover other rodent parvoviruses that might contaminate biotechnological processes. Although no MMV contamination event of human-derived cell lines has been reported in the past, biotechnological processes that are based on these also need to consider MMV-specific testing, as we showed e.g. HEK293, a human-derived cell line commonly used in biopharmaceutical manufacturing as susceptible to productive MMV infection. [1] Farcet et al., Biotechnology & Bioengineering 2024; 121:131-138; DOI: 10.1002/bit.28573