About the chair
Alison has been working in the Cell Sciences group at MedImmune for the past 11 years, most recently as a senior scientist within the Cell Sciences group.

Alison and her team work on development of cell culture media, feeds and bioreactor processes suitable for GMP production. The team also has a keen interest in implementing scale-down bioreactor systems which mimic a larger bioreactor at the millilitre scale.

Previous to Alison’s position at MedImmune she worked at Lonza Biologics for 2 years as a Fermentation Scientist. Alison holds a degree in Applied Microbiology from the University of Manchester. 

About the Speakers

Joshua Kapp heads the Bio-production Business unit at Horizon Discovery Ltd. Joshua was previously involved in the planning of the company’s diagnostics reagents division which has become a cash generating business within 12 months. Horizon Bio-production applies a patented homologous recombination-mediated gene-editing platform exploiting the unique precision of rAAV targeting vectors to the field of bioprocessing through the provision of custom host cell line engineering services. Joshua has a background in preclinical medicine and business, attending medical school at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital in London and business school at Imperial College’s, London Business School. 

Sofia Simaria, an Industrial Engineer by training and is post-doc at UCL developing computer-based decision-support tools that capture the process-business interface of biopharmaceutical manufacture. She has been working on collaborative TSB funded projects between UCL and major biotech companies (eg MedImmune, Lonza) and has joined the newly formed EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing on Emergent Macromolecular Therapies at UCL.

Alison Porter joined Fujifilm Diosynth Biotechnologies (FFDB) in 2011 as Head of Cell Line Development in the Mammalian Cell Culture group. Alison has considerable industrial experience in the construction of recombinant cell lines using mammalian cell lines, having previously spent 13 years in the Cell Culture Process Development group at Lonza prior to joining FFDB. Whilst at Lonza, Alison specialised in working with the GS expression system. Prior to this, Alison spent two years at Bio Products Laboratory, United Kingdom, working with recombinant antibody producing cell lines and utilising hollow fibre culture systems.

Claire Hannell has been working at NanoSight for the past year as an Applications Scientist.  Previously she completed a degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Reading and since joining NanoSight she has split her time between applications, international customer support, scientific research and instrumentation set up.  Claire's main area of expertise is fluorescence work with the NanoSight system.

Keywords:  Gene correction/modification, AAV vectors,  Cell line engineering, biopharmaceutical manufacturing processes, antibody purification, process economics, genetic algorithms, multi-product facility design, homologous recombination, cell line engineering, CHO cell lines, gene targeting, endogenous genome, Cell line development, cell line selection, screening, CHO, mammalian expression systems