UMMS Affiliation
Department of Medicine; RNA Therapeutics Institute; Program in Molecular Medicine
Publication Date
2017-04-24
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Cell Biology | Immunity | Immunoprophylaxis and Therapy | Nervous System Diseases
Abstract
Post-transcriptional gene silencing is a promising therapy for the monogenic, autosomal dominant, Huntington's disease (HD). However, wild-type huntingtin (HTT) has important cellular functions, so the ideal strategy would selectively lower mutant HTT while sparing wild-type. HD patients were genotyped for heterozygosity at three SNP sites, before phasing each SNP allele to wild-type or mutant HTT. Primary ex vivo myeloid cells were isolated from heterozygous patients and transfected with SNP-targeted siRNA, using glucan particles taken up by phagocytosis. Highly selective mRNA knockdown was achieved when targeting each allele of rs362331 in exon 50 of the HTT transcript; this selectivity was also present on protein studies. However, similar selectivity was not observed when targeting rs362273 or rs362307. Furthermore, HD myeloid cells are hyper-reactive compared to control. Allele-selective suppression of either wild-type or mutant HTT produced a significant, equivalent reduction in the cytokine response of HD myeloid cells to LPS, suggesting that wild-type HTT has a novel immune function. We demonstrate a sequential therapeutic process comprising genotyping and mutant HTT-linkage of SNPs, followed by personalised allele-selective suppression in a small patient cohort. We further show that allele-selectivity in ex vivo patient cells is highly SNP-dependent, with implications for clinical trial target selection.
Keywords
Diseases of the nervous system, Huntington's disease, Innate immune cells
Rights and Permissions
Copyright © 2017, The Author(s)
DOI of Published Version
10.1038/srep46740
Source
Sci Rep. 2017 Apr 24;7:46740. doi: 10.1038/srep46740. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Scientific reports
Related Resources
PubMed ID
28436437
Repository Citation
Miller, James R. C.; Pfister, Edith L.; Liu, Wanzhao; Andre, Ralph; Trager, Ulrike; Kennington, Lori A.; Lo, Kimberly; Dijkstra, Sipke; Macdonald, Douglas; Ostroff, Gary R.; Aronin, Neil; and Tabrizi, Sarah J., "Allele-Selective Suppression of Mutant Huntingtin in Primary Human Blood Cells" (2017). Open Access Articles. 3135.
https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/oapubs/3135
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Cell Biology Commons, Immunity Commons, Immunoprophylaxis and Therapy Commons, Nervous System Diseases Commons