Contact information
Maria Ababi
PhD
Virus Production / Screening Scientist
I run the day-to-day operations of the Virus Production Facility (VPF) at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. VPF is an arm of the Genome Engineering Facility, offering laboratory-scale productions of lentivirus (/libraries) and AAV2/n, at Research Grade. The productions are suitable for ex-vivo work, with 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).
Recent publications
A Novel Lentiviral Vector Cargo Gene Silencing System to Benefit Manufacturing of Cell Therapies
Conference paper
Johny S. et al, (2025), MOLECULAR THERAPY, 33
SILENCING LENTIVIRAL VECTOR CARGO GENE TO AID CELL THERAPY MANUFACTURING
Conference paper
Liu Q. et al, (2025), CYTOTHERAPY, 27
Lentiviral vector packaging and producer cell lines yield titers equivalent to the industry-standard four-plasmid process.
Journal article
Tridgett M. et al, (2024), Mol Ther Methods Clin Dev, 32
Lentiviral Vector Packaging and Producer Cell Lines Yield Titres Equivalent to the Industry-Standard Four-Plasmid Process
Conference paper
Tridgett M. et al, (2024), MOLECULAR THERAPY, 32, 224 - 225
Lentiviral Vector Cargo Gene Silencing During Manufacturing
Conference paper
Johny SP. et al, (2024), MOLECULAR THERAPY, 32, 461 - 461
LentiVEX™ Producer Cell Lines: Transfection-Free Production of Lentiviral Vectors Encoding Therapeutically Relevant Transgenes
Conference paper
Tridgett M. et al, (2023), MOLECULAR THERAPY, 31, 676 - 676
LentiVEX Packaging Cell Line v2.0 Yields Comparable LVV Titres to the 4-plasmid Process
Conference paper
Mulet M. et al, (2023), MOLECULAR THERAPY, 31, 393 - 393
Lambda Red Recombineering of Bacteriophage in the Lysogenic State.
Chapter
Tridgett M. et al, (2022), 2479, 11 - 19
Scarless Recombineering of Phage in Lysogenic State.
Journal article
Ababi M. et al, (2022), Methods Mol Biol, 2479, 1 - 9
Lambda Red Recombineering of Bacteriophage in the Lysogenic State. In Methods in Molecular Biology
Journal article
Tridgett M. et al, (2022), Methods in molecular biology (Clifton, N.J.)
Engineering Bacteria to Produce Pure Phage-like Particles for Gene Delivery.
Journal article
Tridgett M. et al, (2021), ACS Synth Biol, 10, 107 - 114
GeneORator: An Effective Strategy for Navigating Protein Sequence Space More Efficiently through Boolean OR-Type DNA Libraries.
Journal article
Currin A. et al, (2019), ACS Synth Biol, 8, 1371 - 1378
Computing exponentially faster: implementing a non-deterministic universal Turing machine using DNA.
Journal article
Currin A. et al, (2017), J R Soc Interface, 14