Production of yellow fever virus in microcarrier-based Vero cell cultures

In this work, the propagation of the 17DD yellow fever virus in Vero cells grown on Cytodex-1 microcarriers was evaluated. After verifying that upon infection the virus adsorption step could be performed under continuous agitation, experiments were carried out in spinners and sparged lab-scale stirred-tank bioreactor to evaluate the use of a commercial serum-free medium (VP-SFM) and to investigate the effects of multiplicity of infection (MOI) and time of infection (TOI) on virus production. Virus titers as high as 8.4 × 108 pfu/mL were obtained upon infection with MOI of 0.02 and TOI of 3 days, using the serum-free medium in the sparged bioreactor.