Directed Evolution of Novel AAV Variants for Enhanced Gene Targeting in Pluripotent Human Stem Cells and Investigation of Dopaminergic Neuron Differentiation

This proposal will develop novel molecular tools and methodologies that will strongly enhance the scientific, technological, and economic development of stem cell therapeutics in California. The most important net benefit will be for the treatment of human diseases. Efficiently introducing specific genetic modifications into a stem cell genome is a greatly enabling technology that would impact many downstream medical applications. This capability will further enable investigations of self-renewal and differentiation, two defining properties of human stem cells. New tools to introduce targeted alterations of ES and iPS cells will also yield key model systems to elucidate mechanisms of human disease, and most importantly enable the generation of mutant cell lines to serve as models of human disease and systems for high throughput screening to develop novel therapies. Finally, the reverse process, the repair of genetic lesions responsible for disease, can in the long run enable the generation of patent-specific stem cell lines for therapeutic application. Each of these applications will directly benefit biomedical knowledge and human health. Furthermore, this proposal directly addresses several research targets of this RFA – the development and utilization of efficient homologous recombination techniques for gene targeting in human stem cells, the development of safer and more effective viral vectors for gene transduction in human stem cells, and the development and analysis of human embryonic stem cell lines with reporter genes inserted into key loci – indicating that CIRM believes that the proposed capabilities are a priority for California’s stem cell effort. While the potential applications of the proposed technology are broad, we will apply it to a specific and urgent biomedical problem: elucidating mechanisms of ES cell differentiation into dopaminergic neurons, part of a critical path towards developing therapies for Parkinson’s disease. While hESCs clearly have this capacity, the underlying mechanisms are incompletely understood, and the efficiency of this process must be improved. We will elucidate transcriptional networks that underlie this process, and utilize our novel gene targeting system to identify and analyze key components of these networks. This work will lead to a better fundamental understanding of mechanisms regulating stem cell differentiation, as well as enhance our ability to control this complex process for biomedical application. The co-investigators have a strong record of translating basic science and engineering into practice through interactions with industry, including the founding of biotech companies in California. Finally, this collaborative project will focus diverse research groups with many students on an important interdisciplinary project at the interface of science and engineering, thereby training future employees and contributing to the technological and economic development of California.