TARGETING ENDOGENOUS SIGNALING PATHWAYS TO AMELIORATE SYSTEMIC AMYLOIDOSES

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DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): RESEARCH SUMMARY Systemic amyloid diseases such as the transthyretin (TTR) amyloidoses are a class of devastating disorders caused by the pathologic aggregation and deposition of specific destabilized proteins as amyloid fibrils on tissues distal from the site of protein synthesis. Currently, no non-invasive therapies exist to treat the majority of these diseases, making systemic amyloidoses a large unmet medical need. A primary factor defining the pathologic extracellular protein aggregation central to these disorders is the secretion of destabilized, amyloidogenic proteins from effector tissues such as the liver. The efficient secretion of these proteins increases serum concentrations of amyloidogenic protein available for pathologic, concentration-dependent aggregation, directly impacting disease pathogenesis in patients. Clinical results from liver transplant recipients show that reducing serum concentrations of amyloidogenic proteins like TTR can decrease pathologic protein aggregation, attenuate peripheral proteotoxicity and improve patient prognosis for patients. We hypothesize that activating the endogenous Unfolded Protein Response (UPR) signaling pathways that regulate protein secretion from effector tissues such as the liver is a non-invasive strategy to similarly decrease secretion and reduce extracellular concentrations of amyloidogenic proteins available for pathologic extracellular aggregation. Consistent with this prediction, we have found that activating the UPR- associated transcription factor ATF6 reduces secretion of destabilized, amyloidogenic TTR mutants in cell culture models, but does not affect the secretion of wild-type TTR or the endogenous secreted proteome. Here, we employ TTR as a model amyloidogenic protein to show that ATF6 activation has therapeutic potential to reduce pathologic extracellular aggregation and proteotoxicity of amyloidogenic TTR mutants. For these experiments, we utilize a novel patient-derived, multi- system induced pluripotent stem cell model of TTR amyloid disease that recapitulates nearly all aspects of TTR amyloid disease pathology observed in patients. Through these efforts, we will show that the stress-independent activation of UPR-associated signaling pathways such as that regulated by ATF6 is a therapeutic strategy to reduce the hepatic secretion, pathologic extracellular aggregation and distal toxicity of amyloidogenic TTR variants associated with the TTR-related amyloidoses. The establishment of this approach for the model protein TTR will suggest that a similar strategy could be applied to attenuate the hepatic secretion and proteotoxic extracellular aggregation of amyloidogenic proteins involved in other systemic amyloidoses, revealing a new therapeutic opportunity to broadly treat these devastating disorders.