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Pre-existing immunity does not impair the engraftment of CRISPR-Cas9-edited cells in rhesus macaques conditioned with busulfan or radiation

Essawi, Khaled
Hakami, Waleed
Naeem Khan, Muhammad Behroz
Martin, Reid
Zeng, Jing
Chu, Rebecca
Uchida, Naoya
Bonifacino, Aylin C
Krouse, Allen E
Linde, Nathaniel S
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Abstract

CRISPR-Cas9-based therapeutic genome editing approaches hold promise to cure a variety of human diseases. Recent findings demonstrate pre-existing immunity for the commonly used Cas orthologs from (SpCas9) and (SaCas9) in humans, which threatens the success of this powerful tool in clinical use. Thus, a comprehensive investigation and potential risk assessment are required to exploit the full potential of the system. Here, we investigated existence of immunity to SpCas9 and SaCas9 in control rhesus macaques ( alongside monkeys transplanted with either lentiviral transduced or CRISPR-SpCas9 ribonucleoprotein (RNP)-edited cells. We observed significant levels of Cas9 antibodies in the peripheral blood of all transplanted and non-transplanted control animals. Transplantation of transduced or SpCas9-mediated enhancer-edited cells did not alter the levels of Cas9 antibodies in rhesus monkeys. Following stimulation of peripheral blood cells with SpCas9 or SaCas9, neither Cas9-specific T cells nor cytokine induction were detected. Robust and durable editing frequencies and expression of high levels of fetal hemoglobin in enhancer-edited rhesus monkeys with no evidence of an immune response (>3 years) provide an optimistic outlook for the use of CRISPR-SpCas9 (RNP)-edited cells.

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Essawi K, Hakami W, Naeem Khan MB, Martin R, Zeng J, Chu R, Uchida N, Bonifacino AC, Krouse AE, Linde NS, Donahue RE, Blobel GA, Gerdemann U, Kean LS, Maitland SA, Wolfe SA, Metais JY, Gottschalk S, Bauer DE, Tisdale JF, Demirci S. Pre-existing immunity does not impair the engraftment of CRISPR-Cas9-edited cells in rhesus macaques conditioned with busulfan or radiation. Mol Ther Methods Clin Dev. 2023 Apr 20;29:483-493. doi: 10.1016/j.omtm.2023.04.004. PMID: 37273902; PMCID: PMC10236215.

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10.1016/j.omtm.2023.04.004
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37273902
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This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International