Establishment and Maintenance of Primary Fibroblast Repositories for Rare Diseases - Friedreich's Ataxia Example

Yanjie Li, Urszula Polak, Amanda D. Clark, Angela D. Bhalla, Yu Yun Chen, Jixue Li, Jennifer Farmer, Lauren Seyer, David Lynch, Jill S. Butler, Marek Napierala

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)324-329
Number of pages6
JournalBiopreservation and Biobanking
Volume14
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - Aug 1 2016

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Medicine (miscellaneous)
  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • Cell Biology

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