Proteome analysis of NanoMEDIC particles

ABSTRACT: CRISPR-Cas9 has tremendous potential as a therapeutic tool for treating human diseases. However, prolonged expression of the nuclease and gRNA from viral vectors in an in vivo context may cause off-target activity and immunogenicity. While extracellular vesicles have been recently demonstrated to be a promising option to transiently deliver the CRISPR-system, sufficient packaging of both Cas9 protein and gRNA is critical to achieve efficient genome editing in hard-to-transfect cells and tissues, such as skeletal muscle. Here, we developed a novel ribonucleoprotein delivery system utilizing two distinct homing mechanisms. The first is by chemical induced dimerization to recruit Cas9 protein into extracellular nanovesicles. The second utilizes a viral RNA packaging signal and two self-cleaving riboswitches to tether and release sgRNA into nanovesicles. We term our fully engineered delivery system NanoMEDIC (nanomembrane-derived extracellular vesicles for the delivery of macromolecular cargo) and demonstrate efficient genome editing in various hard-to-transfect cell types, including human iPS cells and myoblasts. Furthermore, NanoMEDIC production is scalable for industrial production as a xeno-free suspension culture system. As a disease model, therapeutic exon skipping in the dystrophin gene locus was targeted and resulted in over 90% exon skipping efficiencies in skeletal muscle cells derived from Duchenne muscular dystrophy patient iPS cells. Finally, we generated novel luciferase-based reporter mice to demonstrate that NanoMEDIC could induce exon skipping and sustain skipping activity for over 160 days, even though NanoMEDIC itself was rapidly degraded within 3 days, indicating its utility for transient in vivo genome editing therapy of DMD and beyond.

ORGANISM(S): Homo Sapiens (human)

SUBMITTER: Mio Iwasaki 

PROVIDER: PXD014527 | JPOST Repository | Thu Jan 30 00:00:00 GMT 2020

REPOSITORIES: jPOST