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Restoration of functional PAX6 in aniridia patient iPSC-derived ocular tissue models using repurposed nonsense suppression drugs

Cunha, Dulce Lima; Sarkar, Hajrah; Eintracht, Jonathan; Harding, Philippa; Zhou, Jo Huiqing; Moosajee, Mariya; (2023) Restoration of functional PAX6 in aniridia patient iPSC-derived ocular tissue models using repurposed nonsense suppression drugs. Molecular Therapy - Nucleic Acids 10.1016/j.omtn.2023.06.016. (In press). Green open access

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Abstract

Congenital aniridia is a rare, pan-ocular disease causing severe sight loss, with only symptomatic intervention offered to patients. Approximately 40% of aniridia patients present with heterozygous nonsense variants in PAX6, resulting in haploinsufficiency. Translational readthrough inducing compounds (TRIDs) have the ability to weaken the recognition of in-frame premature stop codons (PTCs), permitting full-length protein to be translated. We have established induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived 3D optic cups and 2D limbal epithelial stem cell (LESC) models from two aniridia patients with prevalent PAX6 nonsense mutations. Both in vitro models show reduced PAX6 protein levels, mimicking the disease. Repurposed TRIDs amlexanox and 2,6-diaminopurine (DAP), and positive control compounds ataluren and G418 were tested for their efficiency. Amlexanox was identified as the most promising TRID, increasing full-length PAX6 levels in both models, and rescuing the disease phenotype through normalization of VSX2 and cell proliferation in the optic cups and reduction of ABCG2 protein and SOX10 expression in LESC. This study highlights the significance of patient iPSC-derived cells as a new model system for aniridia and proposes amlexanox as a new putative treatment for nonsense-mediated aniridia.

Type: Article
Title: Restoration of functional PAX6 in aniridia patient iPSC-derived ocular tissue models using repurposed nonsense suppression drugs
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1016/j.omtn.2023.06.016
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.omtn.2023.06.016
Language: English
Additional information: © The Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Institute of Ophthalmology
URI: https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10173127
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