How a Fujifilm Irvine Scientific put automated nanoliter-scale immunoassays to work in cell culture media development.
When you develop cell culture media for AAV production, the quality of your decisions depends on the quality of your measurements. If you can't trust the capsid titer coming out of a crude lysate, you can't reliably rank one media formulation against another — and that slows everything down.
That was the challenge Fujifilm Irvine Scientific set out to solve. In a recent webinar, senior scientist Shan Gao shared her team's experience adopting Gyrolab for AAV capsid titer measurement, alongside Maria Germana Sanna, Field Application Scientist at Gyros Protein Technologies. Below is a summary of what they covered, and why the approach worked.
Fujifilm Irvine Scientific develops mammalian cell culture media, with a focus on how each formulation performs. A typical medium can contain more than 40 components, which means a media library can hold hundreds to thousands of formulations. To find the best one for a given application, the team runs transient transfection for AAV production across dozens to hundreds of cell cultures, monitors cell growth and metabolite profiles, and — after harvest — measures viral genome and capsid titer in clarified crude lysate to rank productivity.
The focus is media performance. So the real requirement is simple to state and hard to meet: reliable, reproducible capsid titer measurement in crude lysate, without matrix effects getting in the way.
The team evaluated three technologies before settling on one.
Conventional ELISA is a well-accepted standard, but it's labor- and time-intensive, with a limited dynamic range. A BLI-based approach ran into a different wall: strong matrix interference produced poor linearity and a limited detection range. Diluting the crude lysate to reduce matrix effects tended to push the sample below the detection limit — leaving no reliable sweet spot. Worse, different dilution factors gave different calculated titers, so it was hard to know which number reflected the real titer. The BLI assay also needed 200–250 µL of sample per measurement, which strained both precious samples and expensive standards.
That's the context in which the team turned to a microfluidics-based, automated immunoassay.
Gyrolab runs immunoassays on a flow-through affinity column format at nanoliter scale. Because the column captures the analyte — in this case the AAV capsid — it inherently separates the capsid from the crude lysate matrix, so the matrix doesn't interfere with detection.
In practice, that gave Fujifilm Irvine Scientific:
Hands-on time per run — sample prep, any needed dilution, and loading — was typically under 30 minutes, with the instrument itself taking about an hour and a half or less.
A few details from the platform introduction help explain the result. Each Gyrolab disc holds many microstructures, each with a pre-packed 15 nL affinity column. All structures on a disk are processed in parallel, which removes the time-dependent and edge artifacts that can appear in plate-based ELISA and keeps every sample under uniform conditions. Different disc formats cover different sensitivity needs, so you can match the disc to the titer range you expect rather than diluting and re-running.
For this work, the team used the Gyrolab AAVX Titer Kit, a ready-to-use kit that quantifies AAV serotypes 1 through 10 (with a separate kit available for AAV9). Only 8 µL of sample is needed to run duplicates — a meaningful advantage when every microliter of a cell or gene therapy sample matters.
Shan Gao presented capsid titer measurements across five HEK293 cell lines — four suspension and one adherent — under a range of culture conditions, vessels, and lysis methods.
A few results stood out:
Depending on the disc used and the titer range, the assay covered a dynamic range from about 10⁸ to 10¹². Notably, all of this data was collected within two and a half days during a demonstration session, when Shan Gao was a first-time user of the instrument.
For Fujifilm Irvine Scientific, the automated immunoassay delivered robust capsid titer measurement across cell lines, culture conditions, vessels, and lysis methods — with excellent linearity, a wide dynamic range, small sample volumes, and real time and labor savings. Since acquiring the instrument, the team has used it to support ongoing cell culture media development.
If you're working through similar matrix and sample-volume constraints in AAV development, it's worth seeing how the approach maps to your own workflow.
Interested in how Gyrolab could fit your AAV titer measurements? Explore our AAV titer kits and case studies, or get in touch to talk through your application.