EFFECT OF GENE EDITING ON AlZHEIMER'S DISEASE

Abstract

Alzheimer’s disease is a chronic neurodegenerative disease responsible for the majority of the cases of dementia in the elderly. The disease symptoms begins with short term memory loss and causes more severe symptoms – problems with language, disorientation, mood swings, behavioral issues – as it progresses, eventually leading to the loss of bodily functions and death. The current study is designed to study the role of gene editing in controlling Alzheimer’s disease on genetic level. In Egypt, The dementia prevalence ranged from 2.01% to 5.07%. Dementia increased with age, with the rapid increase among those aging ≥80. Also, its prevalence was higher among illiterate groups than among educated groups. New era in molecular biology has been developed after the discovery of gene editing by clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) technology. That discovery becomes a hot spot technology used in tremendous biomedical researches. This study was performed at Medical Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Department, Faculty of Medicine, Ain Shams University during the period from May 2017- February 2020. The aim of the present study was to study the effect of gene editing on Alzheimer's disease. We exploited bioinformatics to retrieve a potential target gene involved in AD pathogenesis and knocking out that gene using CRISPR-Cas9 technology. APP gene was the selected gene that probably involved in molecular pathogenesis of AD. CRISPR-Cas9 tool was designed to knockout APP gene off Leucocytes cell line as a therapeutic approach. Assessments were performed to figure out the outcome on viability, count and proliferation of leucocytes and amyloid protein formation. Keywords: Gene Editing, Alzheimer's Disease