HUNTINGTONS DISEASE PATHOGENIC MECHANISMS AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPEUTICS (PB 2024)

Huntington's disease (HD) is one of the most common dominantly inherited neurodegenerative disorders, characterized by a clinical triad of movement disorder, cognitive deficits, and psychiatric symptoms. Huntington’s Disease: Pathogenic Mechanisms and Implications for Therapeutics reviews the most up-do-date content on HD pathogenic mechanisms and cutting-edge thinking on therapeutic strategies for HD. Chapters explore areas that include the clinical features and genetic studies of HD, the cellular and molecular biology of normal huntingtin, a range of HD models, the diverse pathogenic mechanisms linked to mutant huntingtin, new approaches to HD pathogenesis, as well as emerging preclinical therapeutic approaches and clinical programs in the field.

• Reviews the clinical course and genetics of HD
• Reviews the biology of human huntingtin and HD-relevant cell types
• Reviews the wide range of pathobiology associated with mutant huntingtin
• Reviews genetic studies of HD and how these studies are informing the development of new therapeutic approaches
• Reviews new tools and model systems for basic and translational research in HD, including new human-derived model systems, as well as systems biology and artificial intelligence–driven approaches
• Provides an overview of new therapeutic approaches and current clinical programs in HD

Dr. X. William Yang completed his B.S./M.S. degrees in Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry at Yale University in 1991. He obtained M.D./Ph.D. training at Rockefeller University (Ph.D., 1998) and Weill Medical College of Cornell University (M.D., 2000). He co-invented the technology to engineer Bacterial Artificial Chromosomes (BACs) and to generate BAC transgenic mice. His laboratory at UCLA (established in 2002) pioneered the use of a BAC transgenic approach in mice to study pathogenesis of neurodegenerative disorders including Huntington’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and Alzheimer’s disease. The Yang lab has also applied novel genetic and systems biology approaches to study molecular networks in healthy and disease brains, and to study brain-wide morphology of genetically-defined neurons. He is a recipient of BRAIN Initiative Awards from NIH, Brain Disorder Award from McKnight Foundation, the Leslie Gehry Brenner Prize for Innovation in Science in 2014, and is an elected member of the American Society for Clinical Investigation.

Myriam Heiman and her lab use HD patient tissue, as well as mouse and cell models of HD to understand why some cells are more or less vulnerable to the mutant HD gene, and use knowledge of these intrinsic differences to identify new therapeutic targets for HD. Dr. Heiman has pioneered the use of in vivo genetic screening in the mammalian brain, as well as the use of novel single-cell and cell type-specific transcriptional profiling tools to study HD. Her work has recently pointed to the importance of neuronal innate immune activation and cell type-specific mitochondrial dysfunction in HD pathogenesis. Myriam is the recipient of several awards, including an Early Career Investigators Innovation Award from the Bumpus Foundation and a EUREKA grant from the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Thompson is a Donald Bren and Chancellor’s Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California Irvine. She has studied Huntington’s disease (HD) for most of her scientific career and was a member of the international consortium that identified the causative gene for HD in 1993. Since that time, the Thompson laboratory has been actively engaged in investigating the fundamental molecular and cellular events that underlie how the mutant HD gene causes degeneration of specific brain cell populations to induce motor and cognitive decline and premature death of patients with the ultimate goal to develop new treatments, including stem-cell based treatments. Dr. Thompson is the recipient of several awards including the HDF Lesley Gehry Brenner Award for Scientific Innovation in 2013, an NIH Research Program R35 Award and was elected an AAAS fellow in 2013.