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Large-scale transcriptomic analysis reveals that pridopidine reverses aberrant gene expression and activates neuroprotective pathways in the YAC128 HD mouse.

ABSTRACT: Huntington Disease (HD) is an incurable autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder driven by an expansion repeat giving rise to the mutant huntingtin protein (mHtt), which is known to disrupt a multitude of transcriptional pathways. Pridopidine, a small molecule in development for treatment of HD, has been shown to improve motor symptoms in HD patients. In HD animal models, pridopidine exerts neuroprotective effects and improves behavioral and motor functions. Pridopidine binds primarily to the sigma-1 receptor, (IC50 ~?100 nM), which mediates its neuroprotective properties, such as rescue of spine density and aberrant calcium signaling in HD neuronal cultures. Pridopidine enhances brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) secretion, which is blocked by putative sigma-1 receptor antagonist NE-100, and was shown to upregulate transcription of genes in the BDNF, glucocorticoid receptor (GR), and dopamine D1 receptor (D1R) pathways in the rat striatum. The impact of different doses of pridopidine on gene expression and transcript splicing in HD across relevant brain regions was explored, utilizing the YAC128 HD mouse model, which carries the entire human mHtt gene containing 128 CAG repeats.RNAseq was analyzed from striatum, cortex, and hippocampus of wild-type and YAC128 mice treated with vehicle, 10 mg/kg or 30 mg/kg pridopidine from the presymptomatic stage (1.5 months of age) until 11.5 months of age in which mice exhibit progressive disease phenotypes.The most pronounced transcriptional effect of pridopidine at both doses was observed in the striatum with minimal effects in other regions. In addition, for the first time pridopidine was found to have a dose-dependent impact on alternative exon and junction usage, a regulatory mechanism known to be impaired in HD. In the striatum of YAC128 HD mice, pridopidine treatment initiation prior to symptomatic manifestation rescues the impaired expression of the BDNF, GR, D1R and cAMP pathways.Pridopidine has broad effects on restoring transcriptomic disturbances in the striatum, particularly involving synaptic transmission and activating neuroprotective pathways that are disturbed in HD. Benefits of treatment initiation at early disease stages track with trends observed in the clinic.

SUBMITTER: Kusko R

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5963017 | biostudies-other | 2018 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Large-scale transcriptomic analysis reveals that pridopidine reverses aberrant gene expression and activates neuroprotective pathways in the YAC128 HD mouse.

Kusko Rebecca R Dreymann Jennifer J Ross Jermaine J Cha Yoonjeong Y Escalante-Chong Renan R Garcia-Miralles Marta M Tan Liang Juin LJ Burczynski Michael E ME Zeskind Ben B Laifenfeld Daphna D Pouladi Mahmoud M Geva Michal M Grossman Iris I Hayden Michael R MR

Molecular neurodegeneration 20180521 1

<h4>Background</h4>Huntington Disease (HD) is an incurable autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disorder driven by an expansion repeat giving rise to the mutant huntingtin protein (mHtt), which is known to disrupt a multitude of transcriptional pathways. Pridopidine, a small molecule in development for treatment of HD, has been shown to improve motor symptoms in HD patients. In HD animal models, pridopidine exerts neuroprotective effects and improves behavioral and motor functions. Pridopidine b ...[more]

PMID: 29783994

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Project description:Polygenic inheritance plays a central role in Parkinson disease (PD). A priority in elucidating PD etiology lies in defining the biological basis of genetic risk. Unraveling how risk leads to disruption will yield disease-modifying therapeutic targets that may be effective. Here, we utilized a high-throughput and hypothesis-free approach to determine biological processes underlying PD using the largest currently available cohorts of genetic and gene expression data from International Parkinson's Disease Genetics Consortium (IPDGC) and the Accelerating Medicines Partnership-Parkinson's disease initiative (AMP-PD), among other sources. We applied large-scale gene-set specific polygenic risk score (PRS) analyses to assess the role of common variation on PD risk focusing on publicly annotated gene sets representative of curated pathways. We nominated specific molecular sub-processes underlying protein misfolding and aggregation, post-translational protein modification, immune response, membrane and intracellular trafficking, lipid and vitamin metabolism, synaptic transmission, endosomal-lysosomal dysfunction, chromatin remodeling and apoptosis mediated by caspases among the main contributors to PD etiology. We assessed the impact of rare variation on PD risk in an independent cohort of whole-genome sequencing data and found evidence for a burden of rare damaging alleles in a range of processes, including neuronal transmission-related pathways and immune response. We explored enrichment linked to expression cell specificity patterns using single-cell gene expression data and demonstrated a significant risk pattern for dopaminergic neurons, serotonergic neurons, hypothalamic GABAergic neurons, and neural progenitors. Subsequently, we created a novel way of building de novo pathways by constructing a network expression community map using transcriptomic data derived from the blood of PD patients, which revealed functional enrichment in inflammatory signaling pathways, cell death machinery related processes, and dysregulation of mitochondrial homeostasis. Our analyses highlight several specific promising pathways and genes for functional prioritization and provide a cellular context in which such work should be done.

Project description:BackgroundUnderstanding the sensitivity and utility of clinical assessments across different HD stages is important for study/trial endpoint selection and clinical assessment development. The Integrated HD Progression Model (IHDPM) characterizes the complex symptom progression of HD and separates the disease into nine ordered disease states.ObjectiveTo generate a temporal map of discriminatory clinical measures across the IHDPM states.MethodsWe applied the IHDPM to all HD individuals in an integrated longitudinal HD dataset derived from four observational studies, obtaining disease state assignment for each study visit. Using large-scale screening, we estimated Cohen's effect sizes to rank the discriminative power of 2,472 clinical measures for separating observations in disease state pairs. Individual trajectories through IHDPM states were examined. Discriminative analyses were limited to individuals with observations in both states of the pairs compared (N = 3,790).ResultsDiscriminative clinical measures were heterogeneous across the HD life course. UHDRS items were frequently identified as the best state pair discriminators, with UHDRS Motor items - most notably TMS - showing the highest discriminatory power between the early-disease states and early post-transition period states. UHDRS functional items emerged as strong discriminators from the transition period and on. Cognitive assessments showed good discriminative power between all state pairs examined, excepting state 1 vs. 2. Several non-UHDRS assessments were also flagged as excellent state discriminators for specific disease phases (e.g., SF-12). For certain state pairs, single assessment items other than total/summary scores were highlighted as having excellent discriminative power.ConclusionBy providing ranked quantitative scores indicating discriminatory ability of thousands of clinical measures between specific pairs of IHDPM states, our results will aid clinical trial designers select the most effective outcome measures tailored to their study cohort. Our observations may also assist in the development of end points targeting specific phases in the disease life course, through providing specific conceptual foci.

Dataset Information

Large-scale transcriptomic analysis reveals that pridopidine reverses aberrant gene expression and activates neuroprotective pathways in the YAC128 HD mouse.

Publications

Large-scale transcriptomic analysis reveals that pridopidine reverses aberrant gene expression and activates neuroprotective pathways in the YAC128 HD mouse.

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