Engineered Chimeric Proteins Functionally Replace ALS-causing Endogenous FUS and TDP-43 to Improve Neuronal Health

Abstract

Mislocalization and aggregation of the RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) FUS and TDP-43 are pathological hallmarks of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD), contributing to combined loss- and gain-of-function toxicity. Here, we present a protein engineering strategy that appends optimized anti-aggregation motifs to FUS and TDP-43, thereby enhancing their nuclear localization and solubility, and enabling functional replacement of disease-associated proteins. We show that these engineered chimeric RBPs reduce levels of aggregation-prone endogenous proteins through autoregulatory mechanisms. In addition, chimeric FUS and TDP-43 recapitulate key nuclear functions, including DNA repair and mRNA processing. Notably, chimeric FUS restores neurite outgrowth in diseased iPSC-derived neurons, while chimeric TDP-43 suppresses cryptic exon inclusion in patient-derived fibroblasts. Collectively, these results demonstrate that engineered chimeric RBPs can rebalance RBP homeostasis by simultaneously addressing protein aggregation and mislocalization, thus mitigating RBP-associated loss- and gain-of-function toxicity, highlighting a generalizable strategy for therapeutic protein replacement in neurodegenerative disease.