A promising new treatment option for hemophiliacs is in the works at the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Patients with Hemophilia B experience uncontrolled, and sometimes life threatening, bleeding due to loss or improper function of Factor IX (FIX), a protein involved in blood clotting. There is no cure for the disease and patients rely on routine infusions of FIX to prevent excessive blood loss. As you can imagine, this treatment regimen is both time consuming and expensive, while also becoming less effective over time.

Salk researchers, partially funded by CIRM, aimed to develop a more long-term solution for this devastating disease by using the body’s own cells to fix the problem.

In the study, published in the journal Cell Reports, They harvested blood cells from hemophiliacs and turned them into iPSCs (induced pluripotent stem cells), which are able to turn into any cell type. Using gene editing, they repaired the iPSCs so they could produce FIX and then turned the iPSCs into liver cells, the cell type that naturally produces FIX in healthy individuals.

One step therapy

To test whether these FIX-producing liver cells were able to reduce excess blood loss, the scientists injected the repaired human cells into a hemophiliac mouse. The results were very encouraging; they saw a greater than two-fold increase in clotting efficiency in the mice, reaching about a quarter of normal activity. This is particularly promising because other studies showed that increasing FIX activity to this level in hemophiliac humans significantly reduces bleeding rates. On top of that they also observed that these cells were able to survive and produce FIX for up to a year in the mice.

In a news release Suvasini Ramaswamy, the first author of the paper, said this method could eliminate the need for multiple treatments, as well as avoiding the immunosuppressive therapy that would be required for a whole liver transplant.

“The appeal of a cell-based approach is that you minimize the number of treatments that a patient needs. Rather than constant injections, you can do this in one shot.”

While these results provide an exciting new avenue in hemophilia treatment, there is still much more work that needs to be done before this type of treatment can be used in humans. This approach, however, is particularly exciting because it provides an important proof of principle that combining stem cell reprogramming with genetic engineering can lead to life-changing breakthroughs for treating genetic diseases that are not currently curable.