Large scale production of hepatitis A virus in cell culture: effect of type of infection on virus yield and cell integrity.

Approaches to cell culture propagation of hepatitis A virus (HAV) have used either acute infection by passage of infected cell lysates or supernatants into uninfected cells or the passage of persistently infected cells. The findings presented here demonstrate that the growth and recovery of purified virus from foetal rhesus monkey kidney (FRhK4) cells persistently infected with HAV isolate HAS-15 decreased over a 2 to 3 month period. In contrast, high multiplicity acute infection of FRhK4 cells with purified HAS-15 HAV resulted in degeneration of the cell monolayer 2 to 3 weeks later. Large scale propagation of acutely infected cells followed by traditional picornavirus purification procedures reproducibly yielded milligram amounts of purified virus.