Robust real-time cell analysis method for determining viral infectious titers during development of a viral vaccine production process

The classical cell-culture methods, such as cell culture infectious dose 50% (CCID50) assays, are time-consuming, end-point assays currently used during the development of a viral vaccine production process to measure viral infectious titers. However, they are not suitable for handling the large number of tests required for high-throughput and large-scale screening analyses. Impedance-based bio-sensing techniques used in real-time cell analysis (RTCA) to assess cell layer biological status in vitro, provide real-time data. In this proof-of-concept study, we assessed the correlation between the results from CCID50 and RTCA assays and compared time and costs using monovalent and tetravalent chimeric yellow fever dengue (CYD) vaccine strains. For the RTCA assay, Vero cells were infected with the CYD sample and real-time impedance was recorded, using the dimensionless cell index (CI). The CI peaked just after infection and decreased as the viral cytopathic effect occurred in a dose-dependent manner. The time to the median CI (CITmed) was correlated with viral titers determined by CCID50 over a range of about 4-5 log10 CCID50/ml. This in-house RTCA virus-titration assay was shown to be a robust method for determining real-time viral infectious titers, and could be an alternative to the classical CCID50 assay during the development of viral vaccine production process.