big news for asimov today: we're partnering with lonza on in vivo lentiviral vector manufacturing. i'm pretty excited about this one for a lot of reasons. ex vivo CAR-T has now treated tens of thousands of patients, and many of them have been cured of their cancer. but it requires extracting and engineering human cells outside the body, which means every dose is its own batch. it's an impressive manufacturing effort, but it's hard to scale. in vivo approaches skip the cell extraction step. you dose the gene delivery vector directly into the patient, and it engineers the target cells inside their body. this means one drug product can serve many patients, but the catch is that the vector is now the actual drug, not just a reagent, so consistency and a well-defined product profile matter a lot more. traditionally, lentiviral vectors are made by large-scale transient transfection of a production host cell line, which is plagued by scalability and consistency problems. every cell in the bioreactor can receive a different number of plasmids, anywhere from zero to thousands. stable producer cell lines take a different approach. they're clonal engineered lines with the production genetics integrated into the genome, so no transfection is needed during manufacturing. the whole process starts to look more like antibody manufacturing, which is highly controllable and scalable. (as an aside, refactoring the lentivirus genome to gain tight control over the multi-step molecular process it encodes is one of the most technically impressive feats i've seen since starting asimov) we're seeing order of magnitude higher titers and infectivity with our stable producer systems compared to transient transfection. with lonza, we're pairing that with their process development, analytics, and GMP manufacturing expertise to support drug developers. we think in vivo cell and gene therapies are the future, and that they'll bring many more drugs to patients in the years to come.