AAV Gene Therapy Core

AAV Core at VMI has extensive working experience on the development of recombinant adeno-associated viral (rAAV) vectors and its application in gene therapy, providing economical, reliable, and scalable plasmid DNA and AAV viral vector production for basic, translational research, and  pre-clinical trials for Gene and Cell Therapy (GCT).

The newly established AAV Core will a novel platform for faculties at the VMI to win research grants and develops new molecular therapeutic technique from Bench to Bedside. Although continuous technology innovations, AAV Core has developed different-serotyped, tissue-specific, and custom-designed AAV vectors through triple-plasmid transfection system and CsCl ultracentrifugation purification that enable high-quality and high yield of plasmid and AAV large-scale production at the LMP level.

We dedicate ourselves on the new serotype, tissue-specific (cardiac and smooth muscle cells, and endothelial cells) targeted AAV vectors development and high-yield  AAV production technology to accelerate our gene and cell therapy programs.

AAV Core provides research-grade custom AAV packaging service including vector design and AAV viral packaging for basic and translational research, and pre-clinical development.

We have superior quality AAV packaging services to support faculties for their gene therapy programs. We have developed a series of proprietary technologies that have greatly improve AAV production protocols.

We effort to achieve rapid turnaround and affordable prices while maintaining high quality for the research at the Department of Medicine and even in the School of Medicine.

AAV can target different organs or tissues such as heart and lung by choosing appropriate serotypes. There are more than 100 AAV serotypes been discovered already. Based on the literatures in decades we offer multiple serotypes including AAV1, 2, 6, 8, and 9 to meet your gene therapy research needs that are widely used as therapeutic AAV vectors in heart, lung, endothelium, brain, muscle, neural system, retina, liver, kidney, stem cell, etc. That ensure us to use the minimal dose of AAV to achieve the desired effectiveness.

Tissue-specific promoters can also be designed into AAV vectors for better expression of gene of interest in specific cells or tissues that make gene therapy more precise than ever and avoid safety risks.

AAV Core provides experienced technical support to help you with the serotype and promoter selection, vector cloning and plasmid production, AAV packaging, and analytical testing methods for your in vitro and in vivo experiments.

Quality: Custom design, computer analysis, fast speed, and high yield

• Different serotypes of AAV particles
• Single or double strand: suitable for different size of gene
• Gene expression system: regular or inducible
• Delivery system: expression and silence
• Tissue-specific delivery:
  TNT (Heart), Cdh5 and ICAM-2 (Endothelial cell), Syn (Muscle), dMCK or tMCK (Skeletal muscle), SM22 (smooth muscle), and INS (Pancreas), etc.
• Current AAV-gene constructs: more than 200x constructs
  We will generate a gene-vehicle bank for research, educational, and clinical pursuits in the VMI and across the Department of Medicine.
  

Email us at bingwang@pitt.edu for any inquiries. 

PLEASE NOTE: Typical prices are listed below, but are subject to change depending on project. To initiate service, select any of the following options. Please consider including the AAV Core when developing the budget of future grant applications.