Date: March 13, 2020
Source: Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Institute of CNS Regeneration
Author: Chen Gong
A new gene therapy developed by Chen Gong, director of JNU's Center for Brain Repairy, has realized motor functional recovery and extended lifespan among mice with Huntington's disease. The research was published in Nature Communications on Feb. 27.
 

Huntington's is a rare disease characterized by abnormal chorea movement and caused by Huntington (Htt) gene mutation and neurodegeneration in a brain area called the striatum. Chen, a pioneer in the field, uses internal glial brain cells to regenerate functional new neurons directly by overexpressing neural transcription factors in the mouse brain. In 2014, he hosted the world's first conference on In Vivo Reprogramming at the Society for Neuroscience in Washington. Recently, Chen's team further reported for the first time that such direct astrocyte-to-neuron conversion can be successfully reproduced in non-human primate brains (Ge et al., BioRxiv, 2019).
 

（Fig. 1: Engineered AAV2/5 Cre-FLEx system infects striatal astrocytes specifically in the adult mouse brain.）