27 Jan 2012

Stem cells sidle up to neurons, poke them with a membranous finger, and pump them full of short hairpin RNAs that turn off huntingtin, potentially slowing the progression of Huntington’s disease. That’s the scenario envisioned in the December 8 Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience online. A group, led by senior author Jan Nolta of the University of California, Davis, took advantage of mesenchymal stem cells’ propensity to share cellular material across membrane bridges to tune down neural huntingtin in cell culture. “The system is not perfect” in this "proof-of-concept paper," noted Nolta, who said the researchers have plenty of work ahead in optimizing the RNA transfer. Stem cell treatments are looking closer than ever this week with another report, in the January 23 Lancet online, that Advanced Cell Technologies of Marlborough, Massachusetts, successfully transplanted tissue derived from human embryonic stem cells into two people with macular degeneration.

Nolta‘s group researched how to eliminate the extra-long form of the huntingtin (Htt) protein that causes neurodegeneration with RNA interference. “In transgenic mice, this works so well,” Nolta said (see ARF related news story on Harper et al., 2005; Boudreau et al., 2009; Difiglia et al., 2007). But in people, the challenge is how to deliver the silencer, in the form of short hairpin RNAs (shRNAs), across the blood-brain barrier and into the suffering striatal neurons, particularly given that the extracellular milieu is full of RNAs that would chop up the medicine.

Nolta and her team, including first author Scott Olson, who has since moved on to the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, thought that mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) could chauffeur shRNAs right to the heart of the degenerating neurons. MSCs are easy to extract from bone marrow and are considered relatively safe for transplant. They home in on damaged tissue like cellular “paramedics,” Nolta said. The group has already shown that transplanted MSCs can deliver needed factors, such as enzymes and cytokines, to transgenic mice (Meyerrose et al., 2008; reviewed in Meyerrose et al., 2010) and hoped they could also make and share shRNAs. “Their job is to secrete things to other cells, and they can make a huge amount of whatever we engineer them to make,” Nolta said.

Researchers have long known that bacteria and plant cells can transfer nucleic acid from cell to cell, but only recently learned the same is possible in mammalian systems. MSCs make tunneling nanotubules—a bit like a neuron’s axons or dendrites, Nolta said—that reach out and touch other cells (Gerdes and Carvalho, 2008). “It is kind of like putting a little gas hose into the other cell and pouring things into it,” she said. Donor cells may also release exosomes that deliver nucleic acid to neighboring cells (Simons and Raposo, 2009). “The RNA never leaves the protective environment of the cell,” Nolta said.

Olson and Nolta tested the potential for MSCs to deliver huntingtin shRNAs to neurons in culture. The target cells were SH-SY5Y neuroblastoma cells. Olson infected them with a viral vector containing both green fluorescent protein (GFP) and a mutant Htt gene. They used Htt-142, which has 142 CAG repeats in the first exon compared to the normal 28 or fewer, and is associated with juvenile-onset Huntington’s. For the paramedic donors, the researchers used MSCs isolated from donated human bone marrow. They provided the MSCs with shRNA against either the first exon of Htt or a scrambled, control sequence.

Then, Olson put the MSC donors and SH-SY5Y acceptors in the same culture to allow the shRNA transfer and analyzed Htt levels via Western blotting. To account for variable amounts of the Htt-GFP vector’s uptake and expression, he calculated the ratio of the extra-long Htt protein to GFP in the co-cultures; presumably, any cell making GFP also started out making the mutant Htt. After five days, the Htt:GFP ratio dropped by about half in the cultures with the Htt RNAi. The scrambled shRNA construct did not significantly alter Htt levels.

“I have never seen anything quite like this [approach] before,” said Jeanne Loring of The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, who was not involved with the study. While she thought the baseline Htt reduction was “not impressive,” she added, “it is not really the amount that is important at this stage; it is that it does anything at all.” The team might be able to further optimize Htt downregulation in the future, she suggested. Learning more about the mechanism at work in the cultures—be it nanotubules, nanovesicles, or some other transfer technique—will also help identify the best RNAi donors, the authors wrote.

“I really hope they can move forward with it…. My major concern is whether this would work consistently in vivo, and be sustainable,” Loring said. Nolta’s team kept the interference going for a week in culture, and they know that transplanted MSCs survive for a month in rodent brains, but they do not know how long the cells could last and keep pumping shRNAs into their neighbors in a human brain. If Nolta can succeed in perfecting the approach, she hopes it might slow disease in Huntington’s, as well as any other condition where a dominant, toxic protein is causing pathology. For example, mutant SOD1 is responsible for some cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

While a therapy based on this approach is far from the clinic, stem cell treatments are closer than ever with the Lancet publication. Though transplantation of bone marrow stem cells is mainstream, and several trials have progressed with fetal-derived stem cells, Advanced Cell Technologies’ work is the first human transplant of cells derived from human embryonic stem cells (hESCs). First author Steven Schwartz of the University of California, Los Angeles, senior author Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technologies, and colleagues report on how they treated two people with advanced macular degeneration with retinal pigmented epithelium derived from hESCs. Four months in, no undesirable side effects have appeared, and a hint of benefit is apparent. One person went from reading no letters on an eye chart to discerning the five biggest characters; the other went from seeing 21 letters to reading 28, including smaller characters. The researchers suspect that providing the treatment earlier in disease will increase their chances of restoring vision. “Schwartz and colleagues have realized the potential to use hESCs therapeutically in human beings,” wrote Anthony Atala of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in a comment accompanying the Lancet paper. “The report is preliminary…but the results are impressive.”—Amber Dance

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References

News Citations

1. Huntington Disease: Three Ways to Tackle Triplet Disorder 11 Apr 2005

Paper Citations

1. Harper SQ, Staber PD, He X, Eliason SL, Martins IH, Mao Q, Yang L, Kotin RM, Paulson HL, Davidson BL. RNA interference improves motor and neuropathological abnormalities in a Huntington's disease mouse model. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Apr 19;102(16):5820-5. PubMed.
2. Boudreau RL, McBride JL, Martins I, Shen S, Xing Y, Carter BJ, Davidson BL. Nonallele-specific silencing of mutant and wild-type huntingtin demonstrates therapeutic efficacy in Huntington's disease mice. Mol Ther. 2009 Jun;17(6):1053-63. PubMed.
3. Difiglia M, Sena-Esteves M, Chase K, Sapp E, Pfister E, Sass M, Yoder J, Reeves P, Pandey RK, Rajeev KG, Manoharan M, Sah DW, Zamore PD, Aronin N. Therapeutic silencing of mutant huntingtin with siRNA attenuates striatal and cortical neuropathology and behavioral deficits. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2007 Oct 23;104(43):17204-9. PubMed.
4. Meyerrose TE, Roberts M, Ohlemiller KK, Vogler CA, Wirthlin L, Nolta JA, Sands MS. Lentiviral-transduced human mesenchymal stem cells persistently express therapeutic levels of enzyme in a xenotransplantation model of human disease. Stem Cells. 2008 Jul;26(7):1713-22. PubMed.
6. Gerdes HH, Carvalho RN. Intercellular transfer mediated by tunneling nanotubes. Curr Opin Cell Biol. 2008 Aug;20(4):470-5. PubMed.
7. Simons M, Raposo G. Exosomes--vesicular carriers for intercellular communication. Curr Opin Cell Biol. 2009 Aug;21(4):575-81. PubMed.

Further Reading

Papers

1. Gerdes HH. Prions tunnel between cells. Nat Cell Biol. 2009 Mar;11(3):235-6. PubMed.
2. Ramaswamy S, Kordower JH. Gene therapy for Huntington's disease. Neurobiol Dis. 2011 Dec 24; PubMed.
3. Boudreau RL, Spengler RM, Davidson BL. Rational design of therapeutic siRNAs: minimizing off-targeting potential to improve the safety of RNAi therapy for Huntington's disease. Mol Ther. 2011 Dec;19(12):2169-77. PubMed.
4. Maxwell MM. RNAi applications in therapy development for neurodegenerative disease. Curr Pharm Des. 2009;15(34):3977-91. PubMed.
5. Pfister EL, Kennington L, Straubhaar J, Wagh S, Liu W, Difiglia M, Landwehrmeyer B, Vonsattel JP, Zamore PD, Aronin N. Five siRNAs targeting three SNPs may provide therapy for three-quarters of Huntington's disease patients. Curr Biol. 2009 May 12;19(9):774-8. PubMed.
6. Boudreau RL, Davidson BL. RNAi therapy for neurodegenerative diseases. Curr Top Dev Biol. 2006;75:73-92. PubMed.

News

1. Stem Cells Move In, Set Up Shop in Brain 22 Jan 2010
2. Huntington Disease: Three Ways to Tackle Triplet Disorder 11 Apr 2005
3. Therapeutic-Grade Dopaminergic Neurons From Stem Cells? 9 Nov 2011
4. Not So Fast: iPS Cells Have Potential Pitfalls 20 Sep 2010
5. Think Small: Short Synthetic RNAi Safe for Now 28 Sep 2007
6. Treatment Trends: Tapping Stem Cells, DNA, and RNA to Save Neurons 31 Jul 2006
7. Editing Stem Cell DNA to Make the Perfect Cells for Study, Therapy 26 Jul 2011