TY - JOUR AB - Background: Synthetic zinc finger (ZF) proteins can be targeted to desired DNA sequencesand are useful tools for gene therapy. We recently developed a ZF transcription repressor (ZFKOX1)able to bind to expanded DNA CAG-repeats in the huntingtin (HTT) gene, which arefound in Huntington’s disease (HD). This ZF acutely repressed mutant HTT expression in amouse model of HD and delayed neurological symptoms (clasping) for up to 3 weeks. In thepresent work, we sought to develop a long-term single-injection gene therapy approach in thebrain.Method: Since non-self proteins can elicit immune and inflammatory responses, we designed ahost-matched analogue of ZF-KOX1 (called mZF-KRAB), to treat mice more safely incombination with rAAV vector delivery. We also tested a neuron-specific enolase promoter(pNSE), which has been reported as enabling long-term transgene expression, to see whetherHTT repression could be observed for up to 6 months after AAV injection in the brain.Results: After rAAV vector delivery, we found that non-self proteins induce significantinflammatory responses in the brain, in agreement with previous studies. Specifically, microglialcells were activated at 4 and 6 weeks after treatment with non-host-matched ZF-KOX1 or GFP,respectively, and this was accompanied by a moderate neuronal loss. In contrast, the hostmatchedmZF-KRAB did not provoke these effects. Nonetheless, we found that using a pCAGpromoter (CMV early enhancer element and the chicken β-actin promoter) led to a strongreduction in ZF expression by 6 weeks after injection. We therefore tested a new non-viralpromoter to see whether the host-adapted ZF expression could be sustained for a longer time.Vectorising mZF-KRAB with a promoter-enhancer from neuron-specific enolase (Eno2, rat)resulted in up to 77% repression of mutant HTT in whole brain, 3 weeks after bilateralintraventricular injection of 1010 virions. Importantly, repressions of 48% and 23% were stilldetected after 12 and 24 weeks AU - Agustín-Pavón,C AU - Mielcarek,M AU - Garriga-Canut,M AU - Isalan,M DO - 10.1186/s13024-016-0128-x EP - 16 PY - 2016/// SN - 1750-1326 SP - 1 TI - Deimmunization for gene therapy: host matching of synthetic zinc finger constructs enables long-term mutant Huntingtin repression in mice T2 - Molecular Neurodegeneration UR - http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s13024-016-0128-x UR - https://molecularneurodegeneration.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13024-016-0128-x UR - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/39532 VL - 11 ER -