In Vivo Rescue of Cardiomyopathy Through Cardiac Prime Editing

Heart disease affects millions of individuals and prime editing (PE) may enable curative therapies that address the underlying drivers of heart disease. Here we describe the establishment and optimization of an in vivo cardiac PE platform which mediates efficient editing in the heart with no detectable editing in the liver. We performed a proof-of-concept test on RNA binding motif protein 20 (RBM20), which if mutated, can cause dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM) in humans. Our dual-AAV based PE therapeutic rescued cardiomyopathy phenotypes in the heterozygous Rbm20R636Q mouse model. To further develop PE targeting human RBM20, we introduced a novel humanized mouse model carrying human RBM20 wildtype (WT) or R634Q mutant sequences and displaying RBM20 cardiomyopathy phenotypes. Our human RBM20 PE therapeutic efficiently corrected the pathogenic mutation and rescued phenotypes in the humanized RBM20 mouse model. Our findings demonstrate the potential of in vivo cardiac PE in treating heart disease, offer a valuable humanized DCM mouse model for developing various therapies, and present an optimized in vivo PE platform that can be adopted for targeting other organs and tissues.