Back

Two therapeutic CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing approaches revert FTD/ALS cellular pathology caused by a C9orf72 repeat expansion mutation in patient derived cells

Sckaff, M.; Gill, K.; Sachdev, A.; Birk, A. M.; Aladesuyi Arogundade, O.; Watry, H. L.; Keough, K. C.; Tsai, Y.-C.; Ziegle, J.; Conklin, B. R.; Clelland, C. D.

2022-05-21 neuroscience
10.1101/2022.05.21.492887 bioRxiv
Show abstract

CRISPR gene editing holds promise to cure or arrest genetic disease, if we can find and implement curative edits reliably, safely and effectively. Expansion of a hexanucleotide repeat in C9orf72 is the leading known genetic cause of frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). We evaluated three approaches to editing the mutant C9orf72 gene for their ability to correct pathology in neurons derived from patient iPSCs: excision of the repeat region, excision of the mutant allele, and excision of regulatory region exon 1A. All three approaches normalized RNA abnormalities and TDP-43 pathology, but only repeat excision and mutant allele excision completely eliminated pathologic dipeptide repeats. Our work sheds light on the complex regulation of the C9orf72 gene and suggests that because of sense and anti-sense transcription, silencing a single regulatory region may not reverse all pathology. Our work also provides a roadmap for evaluating CRISPR gene correction using patient iPSCs.

Matching journals

The top 2 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.