TY - JOUR
T1 - Establishment and Maintenance of Primary Fibroblast Repositories for Rare Diseases - Friedreich's Ataxia Example
AU - Li, Yanjie
AU - Polak, Urszula
AU - Clark, Amanda D.
AU - Bhalla, Angela D.
AU - Chen, Yu Yun
AU - Li, Jixue
AU - Farmer, Jennifer
AU - Seyer, Lauren
AU - Lynch, David
AU - Butler, Jill S.
AU - Napierala, Marek
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank all FRDA patients for skin biopsy samples. The authors do not declare any conflicts of interest. All authors read the article, contributed comments and suggestions, and approved the final version of the article.
Publisher Copyright:
© Copyright 2016, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. 2016.
PY - 2016/8/1
Y1 - 2016/8/1
N2 - Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) represents a rare neurodegenerative disease caused by expansion of GAA trinucleotide repeats in the first intron of the FXN gene. The number of GAA repeats in FRDA patients varies from approximately 60 to <1000 and is tightly correlated with age of onset and severity of the disease symptoms. The heterogeneity of Friedreich's ataxia stresses the need for a large cohort of patient samples to conduct studies addressing the mechanism of disease pathogenesis or evaluate novel therapeutic candidates. Herein, we report the establishment and characterization of an FRDA fibroblast repository, which currently includes 50 primary cell lines derived from FRDA patients and seven lines from mutation carriers. These cells are also a source for generating induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines by reprogramming, as well as disease-relevant neuronal, cardiac, and pancreatic cells that can then be differentiated from the iPSCs. All FRDA and carrier lines are derived using a standard operating procedure and characterized to confirm mutation status, as well as expression of FXN mRNA and protein. Consideration and significance of creating disease-focused cell line and tissue repositories, especially in the context of rare and heterogeneous disorders, are presented. Although the economic aspect of creating and maintaining such repositories is important, the benefits of easy access to a collection of well-characterized cell lines for the purpose of drug discovery or disease mechanism studies overshadow the associated costs. Importantly, all FRDA fibroblast cell lines collected in our repository are available to the scientific community.
AB - Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) represents a rare neurodegenerative disease caused by expansion of GAA trinucleotide repeats in the first intron of the FXN gene. The number of GAA repeats in FRDA patients varies from approximately 60 to <1000 and is tightly correlated with age of onset and severity of the disease symptoms. The heterogeneity of Friedreich's ataxia stresses the need for a large cohort of patient samples to conduct studies addressing the mechanism of disease pathogenesis or evaluate novel therapeutic candidates. Herein, we report the establishment and characterization of an FRDA fibroblast repository, which currently includes 50 primary cell lines derived from FRDA patients and seven lines from mutation carriers. These cells are also a source for generating induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) lines by reprogramming, as well as disease-relevant neuronal, cardiac, and pancreatic cells that can then be differentiated from the iPSCs. All FRDA and carrier lines are derived using a standard operating procedure and characterized to confirm mutation status, as well as expression of FXN mRNA and protein. Consideration and significance of creating disease-focused cell line and tissue repositories, especially in the context of rare and heterogeneous disorders, are presented. Although the economic aspect of creating and maintaining such repositories is important, the benefits of easy access to a collection of well-characterized cell lines for the purpose of drug discovery or disease mechanism studies overshadow the associated costs. Importantly, all FRDA fibroblast cell lines collected in our repository are available to the scientific community.
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U2 - 10.1089/bio.2015.0117
DO - 10.1089/bio.2015.0117
M3 - Article
C2 - 27002638
AN - SCOPUS:84981303095
SN - 1947-5535
VL - 14
SP - 324
EP - 329
JO - Biopreservation and Biobanking
JF - Biopreservation and Biobanking
IS - 4
ER -