Maria Ababi

I run the day-to-day operations of the Virus Production/Screening Facility (VPSF) at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. VPSF is an arm of the Genome Engineering Facility, offering small scale production of lentivirus (/libraries) and AAV2/n at Research Grade. The productions are suitable for in vitro and in vivo preclinical work, with concentrated titers in the range of 1E8-1E9 TU/mL for lentivirus and 1E12-1E13 GC/mL for AAV2/n. I also have an interest in understanding business/ manufacturing bottlenecks using viruses or virus related products in medical treatments.

Prior, I did my PhD at the University of Warwick in Interdisciplinary Biomedical Research in collaboration with GlaxoSmithKline Vaccines R&D, BE.  My PhD thesis focused on engineering bacterial viruses for the production of practical antimicrobials, with consideration towards: Efficacy, Scale-up and Regulatory guidelines. I then earned an  MRC Career Transition Fellowship in Industry and gained industry experience first at OXGENE, a WuXi Advanced Therapies company, followed by Barinthus Biotherapeutics (formerly Vaccitech).