UMMS Affiliation
Horae Gene Therapy Center; Department of Microbiology and Physiological Systems
Publication Date
2019-12-16
Document Type
Article
Disciplines
Congenital, Hereditary, and Neonatal Diseases and Abnormalities | Genetic Phenomena | Genetics and Genomics | Hematology | Hemic and Lymphatic Diseases | Therapeutics
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Hemophilia A, a bleeding disorder resulting from F8 mutations, can only be cured by gene therapy. A promising strategy is CRISPR-Cas9-mediated precise insertion of F8 in hepatocytes at highly expressed gene loci, such as albumin (Alb). Unfortunately, the precise in vivo integration efficiency of a long insert is very low (~ 0.1%).
RESULTS: We report that the use of a double-cut donor leads to a 10- to 20-fold increase in liver editing efficiency, thereby completely reconstituting serum F8 activity in a mouse model of hemophilia A after hydrodynamic injection of Cas9-sgAlb and B domain-deleted (BDD) F8 donor plasmids. We find that the integration of a double-cut donor at the Alb locus in mouse liver is mainly through non-homologous end joining (NHEJ)-mediated knock-in. We then target BDDF8 to multiple sites on introns 11 and 13 and find that NHEJ-mediated insertion of BDDF8 restores hemostasis. Finally, using 3 AAV8 vectors to deliver genome editing components, including Cas9, sgRNA, and BDDF8 donor, we observe the same therapeutic effects. A follow-up of 100 mice over 1 year shows no adverse effects.
CONCLUSIONS: These findings lay the foundation for curing hemophilia A by NHEJ knock-in of BDDF8 at Alb introns after AAV-mediated delivery of editing components.
Keywords
CRISPR-Cas9, Genome editing, Hemophilia A, Knock-in, NHEJ
Rights and Permissions
© The Author(s). 2019 Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.
DOI of Published Version
10.1186/s13059-019-1907-9
Source
Genome Biol. 2019 Dec 16;20(1):276. doi: 10.1186/s13059-019-1907-9. Link to article on publisher's site
Journal/Book/Conference Title
Genome biology
Related Resources
PubMed ID
31843008
Repository Citation
Zhang J, Cheng X, Zhao M, Li G, Xu J, Zhang F, Yin M, Meng F, Dai X, Fu Y, Yang Z, Arakaki C, Su RJ, Wen W, Wang W, Chen W, Choi H, Wang C, Gao G, Zhang L, Cheng T, Zhang X. (2019). Curing hemophilia A by NHEJ-mediated ectopic F8 insertion in the mouse. Open Access Articles. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-019-1907-9. Retrieved from https://escholarship.umassmed.edu/oapubs/4093
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Included in
Congenital, Hereditary, and Neonatal Diseases and Abnormalities Commons, Genetic Phenomena Commons, Genetics and Genomics Commons, Hematology Commons, Hemic and Lymphatic Diseases Commons, Therapeutics Commons