Methods and Compositions for the Treatment of Huntington's Disease

Patent Status

Additional Patent Pending

Brief Description

The inventors have developed methods and compositions to selectively silence expression from the disease-associated allele while leaving the wildtype version intact. The invention relies on the introduction of a 'poison' exon into the diseased allele wherein introduction of the poison exon may be accomplished by standard methods in the art, such as introduction of the exon sequences through homology-directed repair following targeted nuclease cleavage, transposon-associated targeted sequence introduction, base editing, and prime editing. Following the introduction of the poison exon, post-transcriptional splicing results in an RNA that is susceptible to nonsense mediated decay due to the introduction of a stop codon in the introduced exon. RNAs comprising the poison exon are subsequently degraded in the cell, effectively silencing expression of the mutant disease-associated allele.

Suggested uses

Advantages

Related Materials