Suppression of Huntington’s Disease Somatic Instability by Transcriptional Repression and Direct CAG Repeat Binding

Huntington’s disease arises from a CAG expansion in the huntingtin gene beyond a critical threshold. Current therapeutics primarily aim to reduce toxicity by lowering levels of mutant HTT mRNA and protein. Genetic data support a role for somatic instability in HTT’s CAG repeat as a driver of age of motor dysfunction onset, but currently, the relationship between instability and HTT lowering remains unexplored. Here, we investigate various HTT-lowering modalities to establish the relationship between HTT lowering and instability in Huntington’s disease knock-in mice. We find that repressing transcription of mutant Htt reduces instability, using genetic and pharmacological approaches. Remarkably, zinc finger proteins that target CAG repeats, but lack a repressive domain, protect from somatic instability despite not reducing HTT mRNA or protein levels. These results suggest that DNA-targeted HTT-lowering treatments may have advantages compared to other HTT-lowering approaches, and that steric blockage of CAG repeats may reduce instability while sparing HTT expression.