Autism spectrum disorder: prospects for treatment using gene therapy

Abstract

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is characterised by the concomitant occurrence of impaired social interaction; restricted, perseverative and stereotypical behaviour; and abnormal communication skills. Recent epidemiological studies have reported a dramatic increase in the prevalence of ASD with as many as 1 in every 59 children being diagnosed with ASD. The fact that ASD appears to be principally genetically driven, and may be reversible postnatally, has raised the exciting possibility of using gene therapy as a disease-modifying treatment. Such therapies have already started to seriously impact on human disease and particularly monogenic disorders (e.g. metachromatic leukodystrophy, SMA type 1). In regard to ASD, technical advances in both our capacity to model the disorder in animals and also our ability to deliver genes to the central nervous system (CNS) have led to the first preclinical studies in monogenic ASD, involving both gene replacement and silencing. Furthermore, our increasing awareness and understanding of common dysregulated pathways in ASD have broadened gene therapy's potential scope to include various polygenic ASDs. As this review highlights, despite a number of outstanding challenges, gene therapy has excellent potential to address cognitive dysfunction in ASD.

Keywords: ASD models; Autistic spectrum disorder; Gene therapy; Synaptic dysfunction; Viral vector.

Fig. 1

Proteins known to cause monogenic ASD are shown in red. Some of these, including TSC1/2, directly impact on ribosomal translation via the AKT-mTORC1 (mechanistic target of rapamycin complex 1) pathway, leading to altered synaptic protein expression and hence altered synaptic function. Others feed into this loop at the level of transcript production (MECP2 [125]) and selection (FMRP [123]) and protein degradation (UBE3A [128], not shown). Many other ASD-linked proteins also act within this synaptopathic loop, including various cell adhesion molecules (e.g. neuroligins [NLGNs], neurexins [NRXNs] [129, 130]), scaffolding proteins (e.g. postsynaptic density protein 95 [PSD95] [131]), cytoskeletal proteins (e.g. disrupted in schizophrenia 1 [DISC1] [132]), receptors (e.g. AMPA, NMDA, mGluR [133, 134]) and DNA-binding proteins (e.g. chromodomain-helicase-DNA-binding protein 8 [CHD8] [135, 136]). The entire rapidly expanding list of over 900 ASD-linked genes can be found at the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI) database (https://gene.sfari.org/database/human-gene/)