8:00 am Morning Check In & Coffee

8:50 am Chair’s Opening Remarks

• Shefal Parikh Director, RNA Process Development, Chroma Medicine

Optimizing Upstream Synthesis to Simplify Purification Processes & Obtain High Quality mRNA

9:00 am Supercharging IVT Reactions for Co-Transcriptional Removal of dsRNA to Produce High Purity mRNA & Simplify Post-Translation Steps

• Thomas Ziegenhals Director of IVT, BioNTech

9:30 am Panel Discussion: Simplifying the Purification Process: Optimizing for High Quality DNA & mRNA Synthesis to Reduce Impurities

• James Osborn Senior Scientist, Merck & Co
• Alexander Lemaire Associate Director of Process Development, Strand Therapeutics Inc.
• Thomas Ziegenhals Director of IVT, BioNTech
• Shefal Parikh Director, RNA Process Development, Chroma Medicine

10:00 am Morning Break & Networking

Enhancing dsRNA Purification & Characterization Through Chromatography for High Quality Drug Substance Production

11:00 am Improving Binding Capacity & Throughput of Therapeutic mRNA with Oligo dT (OdT) Immobilized Fibro Prototype Chromatography Media

• Emily Dewar Associate Principal Scientist, Merck & Co

11:30 am Highlighting Scale Up Considerations for Purification Processes to Maintain mRNA Purity & Integrity

• Krishna Sapkota, PhD Scientist II, mRNA Process Development, Beam Therapeutics

12:00 pm Towards Fast & Cost-Effective Purification Processes

• Marco Marques Lecturer - Biochemical Engineering, University College London

12:15 pm Panel Discussion: Boosting Assay Development for Purification Processes to Accurately Measure & Characterize dsRNA to Improve Drug Substance Safety

• Emily Dewar Associate Principal Scientist, Merck & Co
• Craig Martin Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Shefal Parikh Director, RNA Process Development, Chroma Medicine
• Krishna Sapkota, PhD Scientist II, mRNA Process Development, Beam Therapeutics

12:45 pm Lunch Break & Networking

Supercharging Purification from pDNA to mRNA Drug Product Without Compromising Yield to Achieve Desired Quality

1:45 pm Navigating DNA Linearization in its Supercoiled Form & Topology to Enhance DNA Purification Strategies

• James Osborn Senior Scientist, Merck & Co

2:15 pm Harnessing the Power of High-Throughput mRNA Production to Accelerate Process Development and Discovery

• Diana Posadas Director, Strategic Research, GreenLight BioSciences

2:45 pm Decontamination of Purified mRNA Vaccines & Therapeutics

• Georges Belfort Institute Professor of Chemical and Biological Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

3:15 pm Rapid Screening of Materials of Contact for Scale-Up of mRNA-LNP Manufacturing

• Shani Levit Scientist II, CSL Seqirus

3:45 pm Chair’s Closing Remarks

• Shefal Parikh Director, RNA Process Development, Chroma Medicine

4:00 pm End of mRNA Purification Focus Day