Year 2

No effective treatments are available for most neurodegenerative diseases. This study uses Ataxia-Telangiectasia (A-T), an early-onset inherited neurodegenerative disease of children, as a model to study the mechanisms leading to cerebellar neurodegeneration and to develop a drug that can slow or halt neurodegeneration. Aim1 proposed to use “Yamanaka factors” to reprogram A-T patient-derived skin fibroblasts, which carry nonsense mutations that we have shown can be induced by RTCs to express full-length and functional ATM protein, into iPSCs. Aim2 will use these established iPSCs to model neurodegeneration, focusing on differentiation to cerebellar cells, such as Purkinje cells and granule cells. Aim3 will utilize the newly-developed neural cells carrying disease-causing ATM nonsense mutations as targets for evaluating the potential therapeutic effects of leading RTCs.

During the past two years of this project, we established Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) patient-derived iPSC lines from two patients which contain nonsense mutations and splicing mutations. These two lines are currently used for testing the mutation-targeted therapies with small molecule readthrough (SMRT) compounds and antisense morpholino oligonucleotides (AMOs). Manuscript describing this work was recently accepted, showing that SMRT compounds can abrogate phenotypes of A-T iPSC-derived neural cells