FURTHER IMPROVED AAV VECTORS PRODUCED IN INSECT CELLS

摘要

The present invention relates to the production of adeno-associated viral vectors in insect cells. The insect cells therefore comprise a first nucleotide sequence encoding the adeno-associated virus (AAV) capsid proteins, whereby the initiation codon for translation of the AAV VP1 capsid protein is a non-ATG, suboptimal initiation codon and wherein the coding sequence for one or more amino acid residues have been inserted between the suboptimal translation initiation codon and the codon encoding the amino acid residue that corresponds to the amino acid residue at position 2 of the wild type capsid amino acid sequence of which the first amino acid residue is alanine, glycine, valine, aspartic acid or glutamic acid. The insect cell further comprises a second nucleotide sequence comprising at least one AAV inverted terminal repeat (ITR) nucleotide sequence; a third nucleotide sequence comprising a Rep52 or a Rep40 coding sequence operably linked to expression control sequences for expression in an insect cell; and, a fourth nucleotide sequence comprising a Rep78 or a Rep68 coding sequence operably linked to expression control sequences for expression in an insect cell. The invention further relates to adeno-associated viral vectors with an altered ratio of the viral capsid proteins.