Development of a candidate reference material for adventitious virus detection in vaccine and biologicals manufacturing by deep sequencing.

•Deep sequencing has potential as an improved adventitious virus screening method.•15 laboratories sequenced a common reagent containing 25 target viruses.•6 viruses were detected by all lab, the remainder were detected by 4–14 labs.•A wide range of sample preparation and bioinformatics methods is currently used.•A common reference material is essential to enable results to be compared.