Quantifying Viruses? Here's What Matters Most

Originally published in BioPharm International

With viruses playing a greater role in everything from vaccine development to gene therapy, ensuring their rapid, accurate, and biologically relevant enumeration isn’t just an analytical “plus”; it’s the first step in the development of biological tools that support human health.

The catch? Traditional virus-quantification methods haven’t always cleared the high bar that contemporary needs set. That began to change a few years back when a startup in Boulder, CO, designed a new platform for rapidly enumerating total virus particles using reagent technologies that are both biologically relevant and biologically specific.

Seeing the potential in this emerging technology—called the Virus Counter platform—Sartorius Stedim Biotech acquired it in 2016 and made it even better, engineering it into a robust commercial platform. In this Q&A with Antje Schickert, product manager for virus analytics at Sartorius Stedim Biotech, explains how the Virus Counter makes even the trickiest virus enumerations…well, count.