Antibody-mediated depletion of protein variant expression in living cells (Protein interference)

A significant development in the field of human biology is the revelation of millions of unannotated protein sequence variants emerging from the several human genotyping and genome sequencing initiatives. This presents unique opportunities as well as confounding challenges in our understanding of how molecular signalling outcomes vary among individuals in the general population. As a result the conventional ‘one drug fits all’ lines of approach in the drug discovery process is becoming obsolete. However, an innovative genotype-specific approach targeting protein sequence variants instead of a reference protein target is currently lacking. In this short communication we report a remarkable observation of antibody-mediated knockdown of intracellular protein expression. This suggests allele-specific inhibition of protein-variant expression can be achieved by intracellular delivery of lipid conjugated linear epitope-specific monoclonal antibodies. The results presented here demonstrate novel opportunities for interrogating the protein coding variations in the human genomes and new therapeutic strategies for the inhibition of pathogenic protein variants in a genotype-centric manner.