Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: Retinitis pigmentosa (RP) is an inherited neurodegenerative disease, in which the death of mutant rod photoreceptors leads secondarily to the non-cell autonomous death of cone photoreceptors. Gene therapy is a promising treatment strategy. Unfortunately, current methods of gene delivery treat only a fraction of diseased cells, yielding retinas that are a mosaic of treated and untreated rods, as well as cones. In this study, we created two RP mouse models to test whether dying, untreated rods negatively impact treated, rescued rods. In one model, treated and untreated rods were segregated. In the second model, treated and untreated rods were diffusely intermixed, and their ratio was controlled to achieve low-, medium-, or high-efficiency rescue. Analysis of these mosaic retinas demonstrated that rescued rods (and cones) survive, even when they are greatly outnumbered by dying photoreceptors. On the other hand, the rescued photoreceptors did exhibit long-term defects in their outer segments (OSs), which were less severe when more photoreceptors were treated. In summary, our study suggests that even low-efficiency gene therapy may achieve stable survival of rescued photoreceptors in RP patients, albeit with OS dysgenesis.
Authors: Susanne F. Koch, Jimmy K. Duong, Chun-Wei Hsu, Yi-Ting Tsai, Chyuan-Sheng Lin, Christian A. Wahl-Schott, Stephen H. Tsang
Language: English
Subfield: Molecular Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: G2582999999, Core Facilities for Vision Research, Evaluating GWAS AMD Candidate Loci by Gene Editing in Human iPS Cells, Mechanistic Studies on Regenerative Medicine Approaches to Childhood Blindness, G8415332196, G8429892198, Defining Barriers to Gene Therapy, Gene Editing and Silencing in Phototransduction, Cancer Center Support Grant
OpenAlex ID: W2611565615