In October 2020, Novartis announced that branaplam reduces the amount of huntingtin protein, which is one of the major therapeutic approaches in Huntington's disease. In 2021, U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted an orphan drug status to branaplam for treatment of Huntington's disease, and Novartis announced that they would start clinical trials in 2021.[7] In August 2022, Novartis temporarily halted the dosing with branaplam in its clinical studies, and in December 2022 the company discontinued the study due to negative safety signals.[8]
Use in biomedical research
Branaplam can be used as a so-called Xon inducer[9] of splicing for control of gene expression. For example, branaplam was used as an Xon inducer to tightly control Cas9 expression with a modified branaplam-sensitive splicing cassette from the SF3B3 gene.[10]
^Palacino J, Swalley SE, Song C, Cheung AK, Shu L, Zhang X, et al. (July 2015). "SMN2 splice modulators enhance U1-pre-mRNA association and rescue SMA mice". Nature Chemical Biology. 11 (7): 511–517. doi:10.1038/nchembio.1837. PMID26030728.
^Srinivasan R, Sun T, Sandles A, Wu D, Wang L, Heidersbach AJ, et al. (2024-12-28), "Chemically-inducible CRISPR/Cas9 circuits for ultra-high dynamic range gene perturbation", bioRxiv, doi:10.1101/2024.12.27.630546