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siRNA screen identifies QPCT as a druggable target for Huntington’s disease


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Authors

Jimenez-Sanchez, Maria 
Lam, Wun 
Hannus, Michael 
Sönnichsen, Birte 
Imarisio, Sara 

Abstract

Huntington's disease (HD) is a currently incurable neurodegenerative condition caused by an abnormally expanded polyglutamine tract in ​huntingtin (​HTT). We identified new modifiers of mutant ​HTT toxicity by performing a large-scale 'druggable genome' siRNA screen in human cultured cells, followed by hit validation in Drosophila. We focused on ​glutaminyl cyclase (​QPCT), which had one of the strongest effects on mutant ​HTT-induced toxicity and aggregation in the cell-based siRNA screen and also rescued these phenotypes in Drosophila. We found that ​QPCT inhibition induced the levels of the molecular chaperone ​αB-crystallin and reduced the aggregation of diverse proteins. We generated new ​QPCT inhibitors using in silico methods followed by in vitro screening, which rescued the HD-related phenotypes in cell, Drosophila and zebrafish HD models. Our data reveal a new HD druggable target affecting mutant ​HTT aggregation and provide proof of principle for a discovery pipeline from druggable genome screen to drug development.

Description

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final published version is available via NPG at http://www.nature.com/nchembio/journal/v11/n5/full/nchembio.1790.html#.

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Journal Title

Nature Chemical Biology

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Journal ISSN

Volume Title

11

Publisher

NPG
Sponsorship
We are grateful for funding from the UK Medical Research Council (COEN grant MR/J006904/1 to D.C.R. and C.J.O.'K.), the Wellcome Trust (Principal Fellowship 095317/Z/11/Z, to D.C.R., and strategic award 100140), the National Institute of Health Research Biomedical Research Unit in Dementia at Addenbrooke's Hospital, the TAMAHUD project (European Community FP6 grant no. 03472 under the Thematic Call LSH-2005-2.1.3-8 “Early markers and new targets for neurodegenerative diseases”) and the NEUROMICS project (European Community Seventh Framework Programme under grant agreement no. 2012-305121). We thank J.L. Marsh, N. Perrimon and the Vienna Drosophila RNAi Center for fly stocks; M. Renna and S. Luo for helpful comments; M. Lichtenberg for help with flow cytometry assays; F. Siddiqi and M. Garcia-Arencibia for help with primary cultures; W. Fecke for advice and assistance; and S. Gotta for help in high-resolution MS analysis of compounds.