| Autor: |
Sachith Mettananda |
| Jazyk: |
angličtina |
| Rok vydání: |
2021 |
| Předmět: |
|
| Zdroj: |
Frontiers in Genome Editing, Vol 3 (2021) |
| Druh dokumentu: |
article |
| ISSN: |
2673-3439 |
| DOI: |
10.3389/fgeed.2021.752278 |
| Popis: |
β-Thalassaemia is caused by over 300 mutations in and around the β-globin gene that lead to impaired synthesis of β-globin. The expression of α-globin continues normally, resulting in an excess of α-globin chains within red blood cells and their precursors. These unpaired α-globin chains form unstable α-hemichromes that trigger cascades of events to generate reactive oxygen species, leading to ineffective erythropoiesis and haemolysis in patients with β-thalassaemia. The clinical genetic data reported over several decades have demonstrated how the coinheritance of α-thalassaemia ameliorates the disease phenotype of β-thalassaemia. Thus, it is evident that down-regulation of the α-globin gene expression in patients with β-thalassaemia could ameliorate or even cure β-thalassaemia. Over the last few years, significant progress has been made in utilising this pathway to devise a cure for β-thalassaemia. Most research has been done to alter the epigenetic landscape of the α-globin locus or the well-characterised distant enhancers of α-globin. In vitro, pre-clinical studies on primary human erythroid cells have unveiled inhibition of histone lysine demethylation and histone deacetylation as potential targets to achieve selective downregulation of α-globin through epigenetic drug targeting. CRISPR based genome editing has been successfully used in vitro to mutate α-globin genes or enhancers of α-goblin to achieve clinically significant knockdowns of α-globin to the levels beneficial for patients with β-thalassaemia. This review summarises the current knowledge on the regulation of human α-globin genes and the clinical genetic data supporting the pathway of targeting α-globin as a treatment for β-thalassaemia. It also presents the progress of epigenetic drug and genome editing approaches currently in development to treat β-thalassaemia. |
| Databáze: |
Directory of Open Access Journals |
| Externí odkaz: |
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