Prospects for the Etiotropic Treatment of Dysferlinopathy

Abstract

Dysferlinopathies belong to a phenotypically heterogeneous group of neuromuscular diseases caused by mutations in the DYSF gene, which disrupt the expression of dysferlin protein in human skeletal muscle cells. These pathologies are of an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern, their prevalence is 1: 200000. Dysferlinopathies include diseases such as Miyoshi myopathy with primary lesion of the distal fragments of the lower extremities and limb-gridle muscular dystrophy type 2B with primary lesion of the proximal fragments of both the lower and upper limbs, also distal myopathy with anterior tibial onset (DMAT). Nowdays, there are various pathogenetic and symptomatic treatments for hereditary muscular dystrophies but there are very few registered drugs for the etiological treatment of these diseases. This review discusses the main modern methods of gene therapy that can be used to treat dysferlinopathies, such as stop-codon passing, exon skipping, overexpression of other genes, gene transfer, splicosome-mediated trans-splicing, and also describes the latest experimental studies using these methods. In conclusion, exon-skipping and trans-splicing have been identified as the most optimal approaches in the treatment of muscular dystrophies, in particular dysferlinopathies.