Long term rescue of Alzheimer deficits in vivo by one-time gene-editing of App C-terminus.
Gene-editing technologies promise to create a new class of therapeutics that can achieve permanent correction with a single intervention. Besides eliminating mutant alleles in familial disease, gene-editing can manipulate upstream pathophysiologic events and alter disease-course in wider patient populations. Here we use CRISPR-Cas9 to edit the last exon of amyloid precursor protein (App), relevant for Alzheimers disease (AD). Our strategy effectively eliminates an endocytic (YENPTY) motif at APP C-terminus in mouse and human neurons, while preserving N-terminus and compensatory APP-homologues. This manipulation favorably alters events along the amyloid-pathway; inhibiting toxic APP-beta-cleavage fragments (including Abeta) and upregulating neuroprotective APP-alpha-cleavage. AAV-editing ameliorates neuropathologic, electrophysiologic, and behavioral deficits in an AD knockin mouse model. Effects persist for many months with no detectable abnormalities in germline-edited WT mice, and pathologic alterations in glial-transcriptomes are also normalized. Our strategy takes advantage of innate transcriptional rules that render terminal exons insensitive to nonsense-decay, and this upstream manipulation is expected to be effective for all forms of AD.