I usually pay little attention to animal models of neurologic disease. After all, our brain is what separates us from animals (recent human behavior excepted). Neuromuscular disease is different because our peripheral nerves and muscles work the same way as animals. An astounding paper from Harvard and Brazil, gives us an entirely new angle to treat muscular dystrophy, particularly the Duchenne form. I ran a muscular dystrophy clinic for 15 years in the 70s and 80s and haplessly watched young boys deteriorate and die from Duchenne. The major therapeutic advance during that time was — hold your breath — lighter weight braces, allowing the boys to stay out of wheelchairs a bit longer.
Some background for those who don’t know, the molecular defect in Duchenne was found in ’87. Interestingly Kunkel, one of the authors on the original paper [ Cell vol. 51 pp.; 919 – 928 ’87 ] is an author on the present one [ Cell vol. 163 pp. 1204 – 1213 ’15 ]. Duchenne dystrophy affects only males, as the gene for the protein (dystrophin) is found on the X chromosome, so women with a normal X and a mutant X escape. To show how pathetic things were back then, we tried to find out if a sister of a patient was a carrier. How did we do it. By measuring an enzyme released by damaged muscle (CPK) on several occasion. Carriers often showed an elevation.
The mutated protein is called dystrophin. It hooks the contractile apparatus of a muscle cell to the membrane. Failure of this makes muscle cells more fragile when they contract resulting in eventual loss. From a molecular biological point of view the protein is fascinating. The gene is one of largest known, stretching over 2,220,233 positions (nucleotides) on the X chromosome and containing 79 exons. Figuring a transcription rate of 100 nucleotides a second, it takes 6 hours to make the messenger RNA (mRNA) for it. The protein has 3,685 amino acids and figuring a translation rate of 3 – 6 amino acids/second it takes 10 minutes for the ribosome to make it. Given that it takes only 3 nucleotides to code for an amino acid, the protein coding part of the gene takes up only .5% of the gene. Correctly splicing out the introns is a huge task, which we all perform well. This size and complexity of the gene explains why mutations are so common, making it the most common form of hereditary muscular dystrophy (most are).
There are currently all sorts of efforts underway to correct the mutation, particularly in a milder form called Becker dystrophy. Derek has covered them and they constitute a logical direct attack on the pathology.
What is so remarkable about the current Cell paper is that it gives us an entirely new and different way to attack Duchenne (and possible all forms of muscular dystrophy). It involves a colony of dogs in Brazil. They have GRMD (Golden Retriever Muscular Dystrophy) with a mutation in one of the many splice sites in dystrophin (it has 79 exons in man) leading to a premature stop codon and no functional dystrophin in the dogs’ muscles. The animals weaken and become non ambulatory with a shortened lifespan. However, a few of the dogs in the colony seemed pretty normal. So they went to work. The obvious reason was that gene was in some way repaired so the animals had normal amounts of dystrophin. Not so, even though ambulatory, the animals’ muscles had no dystrophin. So the whole genome was sequenced. What they found was that a mutation at an upstream site of a protein called Jagged1 lead to increased transcription of the gene and increased levels of the protein.
Jagged1 is a protein ligand for the Notch system of receptors. The Notch system is important in muscle regeneration. The myoblasts of the animals had more proliferative capacity. The Notch system is far too complicated to go into here — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notch_signaling_pathway, but expect to see a lot more research money pumped into it.
What I find so fabulous about this paper, is that it gives us an entirely new way of thinking about Duchenne, totally unrelated to the genetic defect, which had been our focus up to now. It also rubs our noses in how little we understand about our molecular biology and cell physiology. If we really understood things, we’d have been focused on Notch years ago. Yet another reason drug discovery is so hard. We are trying to alter a system we only dimly understand.
Chemiotics II 