Brain Penetrable Inhibitors of Ceramide Galactosyltransferase for the Treatment of Lysosomal Storage Disorders.
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ABSTRACT: Metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD) is a rare, genetic lysosomal storage disorder caused by the deficiency of arylsulfatase A enzyme, which results in the accumulation of sulfatide in the lysosomes of the tissues of central and peripheral nervous systems, leading to progressive demyelination and neurodegeneration. Currently there is no cure for this disease, and the only approved therapy, hematopoietic stem cell transplant, has limitations. We proposed substrate reduction therapy (SRT) as a novel approach to treat this disease, by inhibiting ceramide galactosyltransferase enzyme (UGT8). This resulted in the identification of a thienopyridine scaffold as a starting point to initiate medicinal chemistry. Further optimization of hit compound 1 resulted in the identification of brain penetrable, orally bioavailable compound 19, which showed efficacy in the in vivo pharmacodynamic models, indicating the potential to treat MLD with UGT8 inhibitors.
Project description:Ceramides are a family of bioactive lipids belonging to the class of sphingolipids. Sphingolipidoses are a group of inherited genetic diseases characterized by the unmetabolized sphingolipids and the consequent reduction of ceramide pool in lysosomes. Sphingolipidoses include several disorders as Sandhoff disease, Fabry disease, Gaucher disease, metachromatic leukodystrophy, Krabbe disease, Niemann Pick disease, Farber disease, and GM2 gangliosidosis. In sphingolipidosis, lysosomal lipid storage occurs in both the central nervous system and visceral tissues, and central nervous system pathology is a common hallmark for all of them. Parkinson's disease, the most common neurodegenerative movement disorder, is characterized by the accumulation and aggregation of misfolded ?-synuclein that seem associated to some lysosomal disorders, in particular Gaucher disease. This review provides evidence into the role of ceramide metabolism in the pathophysiology of lysosomes, highlighting the more recent findings on its involvement in Parkinson's disease.
Project description:Lysosomal storage disorders are rare inborn errors of metabolism, with a combined incidence of 1 in 1500 to 7000 live births. These relatively rare disorders are seldom considered when evaluating a sick newborn. A significant number of the >50 different lysosomal storage disorders, however, do manifest in the neonatal period and should be part of the differential diagnosis of several perinatal phenotypes. We review the earliest clinical features, diagnostic tests, and treatment options for lysosomal storage disorders that can present in the newborn. Although many of the lysosomal storage disorders are characterized by a range in phenotypes, the focus of this review is on the specific symptoms and clinical findings that present in the perinatal period, including neurologic, respiratory, endocrine, and cardiovascular manifestations, dysmorphic features, hepatosplenomegaly, skin or ocular involvement, and hydrops fetalis/congenital ascites. A greater awareness of these features may help to reduce misdiagnosis and promote the early detection of lysosomal storage disorders. Implementing therapy at the earliest stage possible is crucial for several of the lysosomal storage disorders; hence, an early appreciation of these disorders by physicians who treat newborns is essential.
Project description:The lysosomal storage disorders are a clinically heterogeneous group of inborn errors of metabolism, associated with the accumulation of incompletely degraded macromolecules within several cellular sites. Affected individuals present with a broad range of clinical problems, including hepatosplenomegaly and skeletal dysplasia. Onset of symptoms may range from birth to adulthood. Most are associated with neurologic features. Later-onset forms are often misdiagnosed as symptoms, which might include psychiatric manifestations, are slowly progressive, and may precede other neurologic or systemic features. Symptomatic care, which remains the mainstay for most subtypes, can lead to significant improvement in quality of life.
Project description:Significant advances in therapy for lysosomal storage disorders have occurred with an accelerating pace over the past decade. Although enzyme replacement therapy has improved the outcome of lysosomal storage disorders, antibody responses have occurred and sometimes prevented efficacy, especially in cross-reacting immune material negative patients with Pompe disease. Preclinical gene therapy experiments have revealed the relevance of immune responses to long-term efficacy. The choice of regulatory cassette played a critical role in evading humoral and cellular immune responses to gene therapy in knockout mouse models, at least in adult animals. Liver-specific regulatory cassettes prevented antibody formation and enhanced the efficacy of gene therapy. Regulatory T cells prevented transgene directed immune responses, as shown by adoptive transfer of antigen-specific immune tolerance to enzyme therapy. Immunomodulatory gene therapy with a very low vector dose could enhance the efficacy of enzyme therapy in Pompe disease and other lysosomal storage disorders.
Project description:Lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) are a large group of more than 50 different inherited metabolic diseases which, in the great majority of cases, result from the defective function of specific lysosomal enzymes and, in few cases, of non-enzymatic lysosomal proteins or non-lysosomal proteins involved in lysosomal biogenesis. The progressive lysosomal accumulation of undegraded metabolites results in generalised cell and tissue dysfunction, and, therefore, multi-systemic pathology. Storage may begin during early embryonic development, and the clinical presentation for LSDs can vary from an early and severe phenotype to late-onset mild disease. The diagnosis of most LSDs--after accurate clinical/paraclinical evaluation, including the analysis of some urinary metabolites--is based mainly on the detection of a specific enzymatic deficiency. In these cases, molecular genetic testing (MGT) can refine the enzymatic diagnosis. Once the genotype of an individual LSD patient has been ascertained, genetic counselling should include prediction of the possible phenotype and the identification of carriers in the family at risk. MGT is essential for the identification of genetic disorders resulting from non-enzymatic lysosomal protein defects and is complementary to biochemical genetic testing (BGT) in complex situations, such as in cases of enzymatic pseudodeficiencies. Prenatal diagnosis is performed on the most appropriate samples, which include fresh or cultured chorionic villus sampling or cultured amniotic fluid. The choice of the test--enzymatic and/or molecular--is based on the characteristics of the defect to be investigated. For prenatal MGT, the genotype of the family index case must be known. The availability of both tests, enzymatic and molecular, enormously increases the reliability of the entire prenatal diagnostic procedure. To conclude, BGT and MGT are mostly complementary for post- and prenatal diagnosis of LSDs. Whenever genotype/phenotype correlations are available, they can be helpful in prognosis and in making decisions about therapy.
Project description:Even though lysosomal storage disorders (LSDs) are considered to be orphan diseases, they pose a highly relevant cause for morbidity and mortality as their cumulative prevalence is estimated to be 1:4,000. This is especially important as treatment in form of enzyme replacement therapy, substrate reduction therapy or stem cell transplantation is amenable for some LSDs. It is plausible that an early start of treatment might improve the overall prognosis and, even more important, prevent irreversible damage of key organs. To get a more precise insight into the real frequency of some LSDs in the general population, we screened 40,024 samples from the Hungarian newborn screening (NBS) program in Szeged for Fabry disease (FD), Gaucher disease (GD), Pompe disease (PD), and Niemann-Pick A/B (NPB) disease using tandem mass spectrometry. Altogether, 663 samples (1.66%) were submitted for retesting. Genetic confirmation was carried out for 120 samples with abnormal screening results after retesting, which identified three cases of GD, three cases of FD, nine cases of PD, and two cases with NPB. In some cases, we detected up to now unknown mutations - one in NPB and seven in PD - which raise questions about the clinical consequences of a NBS in the sense of late-onset manifestations. Overall, we conclude that screening for LSDs by tandem MS/MS followed by a genetic workup in identified patients is a robust, easy, valid, and feasible technology in newborn screening programs. Furthermore, early diagnosis of LSDs gives a chance to early treatment, but needs more clinical long-term data especially regarding the consequence of private mutations.
Project description:Three-dimensional structures of proteins can provide important clues into the efficacy of personalized treatment. We perform a structural analysis of variants within three inherited lysosomal storage disorders, comparing variants responsive to pharmacological chaperone treatment to those unresponsive to such treatment. We find that predicted ΔΔG of mutation is higher on average for variants unresponsive to treatment, in the case of datasets for both Fabry disease and Pompe disease, in line with previous findings. Using both a single decision tree and an advanced machine learning approach based on the larger Fabry dataset, we correctly predict responsiveness of three Gaucher disease variants, and we provide predictions for untested variants. Many variants are predicted to be responsive to treatment, suggesting that drug-based treatments may be effective for a number of variants in Gaucher disease. In our analysis, we observe dependence on a topological feature reporting on contact arrangements which is likely connected to the order of folding of protein residues, and we provide a potential justification for this observation based on steady-state cellular kinetics.
Project description:Lysosomal Storage Disorders (LSDs) are a group of metabolic syndromes, each one due to the deficit of one lysosomal enzyme. Many LSDs affect most of the organ systems and overall about 75% of the patients present neurological impairment. Enzyme Replacement Therapy, although determining some systemic clinical improvements, is ineffective on the CNS disease, due to enzymes' inability to cross the blood-brain barrier (BBB). With the aim to deliver the therapeutic enzymes across the BBB, we here assayed biodegradable and biocompatible PLGA-nanoparticles (NPs) in two murine models for LSDs, Mucopolysaccharidosis type I and II (MPS I and MPS II). PLGA-NPs were modified with a 7-aminoacid glycopeptide (g7), yet demonstrated to be able to deliver low molecular weight (MW) molecules across the BBB in rodents. We specifically investigated, for the first time, the g7-NPs ability to transfer a model drug (FITC-albumin) with a high MW, comparable to the enzymes to be delivered for LSDs brain therapy. In vivo experiments, conducted on wild-type mice and knockout mouse models for MPS I and II, also included a whole series of control injections to obtain a broad preliminary view of the procedure efficiency. Results clearly showed efficient BBB crossing of albumin in all injected mice, underlying the ability of NPs to deliver high MW molecules to the brain. These results encourage successful experiments with enzyme-loaded g7-NPs to deliver sufficient amounts of the drug to the brain district on LSDs, where exerting a corrective effect on the pathological phenotype.
Project description:Gene replacement therapy for the neurological deficits caused by lysosomal storage disorders, such as in Niemann-Pick disease type A, will require widespread expression of efficacious levels of acid sphingomyelinase (ASM) in the infant human brain. At present there is no treatment available for this devastating pediatric condition. This is partly because of inherent constraints associated with the efficient delivery of therapeutic agents into the CNS of higher order models. In this study we used an adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2) vector encoding human acid sphingomyelinase tagged with a viral hemagglutinin epitope (AAV2-hASM-HA) to transduce highly interconnected CNS regions such as the brainstem and thalamus. On the basis of our data showing global cortical expression of a secreted reporter after thalamic delivery in nonhuman primates (NHPs), we set out to investigate whether such widespread expression could be enhanced after brainstem infusion. To maximize delivery of the therapeutic transgene throughout the CNS, we combined a single brainstem infusion with bilateral thalamic infusions in naive NHPs. We found that enzymatic augmentation in brainstem, thalamic, cortical, as well subcortical areas provided convincing evidence that much of the large NHP brain can be transduced with as few as three injection sites.
Project description:Abstract Acetyl-dl-leucine is a derivative of the branched chain amino acid leucine. In observational clinical studies, acetyl-dl-leucine improved symptoms of ataxia, in particular in patients with the lysosomal storage disorder, Niemann-Pick disease type C1. Here, we investigated acetyl-dl-leucine and its enantiomers acetyl-l-leucine and acetyl-d-leucine in symptomatic Npc1?/? mice and observed improvement in ataxia with both individual enantiomers and acetyl-dl-leucine. When acetyl-dl-leucine and acetyl-l-leucine were administered pre-symptomatically to Npc1?/? mice, both treatments delayed disease progression and extended life span, whereas acetyl-d-leucine did not. These data are consistent with acetyl-l-leucine being the neuroprotective enantiomer. Altered glucose and antioxidant metabolism were implicated as one of the potential mechanisms of action of the l-enantiomer in Npc1?/? mice. When the standard of care drug miglustat and acetyl-dl-leucine were used in combination significant synergy resulted. In agreement with these pre-clinical data, when Niemann-Pick disease type C1 patients were evaluated after 12 months of acetyl-dl-leucine treatment, rates of disease progression were slowed, with stabilization or improvement in multiple neurological domains. A beneficial effect of acetyl-dl-leucine on gait was also observed in this study in a mouse model of GM2 gangliosidosis (Sandhoff disease) and in Tay-Sachs and Sandhoff disease patients in individual-cases of off-label-use. Taken together, we have identified an unanticipated neuroprotective effect of acetyl-l-leucine and underlying mechanisms of action in lysosomal storage diseases, supporting its further evaluation in clinical trials in lysosomal disorders. This study investigates the disease-modifying effect of acetyl-DL-leucine in two neurodegenerative lysosomal storage diseases with different aetiologies: Niemann-Pick type C and GM2 gangliosidosis in both murine models and clinical studies. Acetyl-DL-leucine and its L enantiomer provide neuroprotection likely by altering metabolism – a new therapeutic approach for these diseases. Graphical Abstract Graphical Abstract