The Genetics Podcast
EP 240: Hijacking DNA repair machinery to treat Huntington’s disease with Vincent Dion of the UKDRI
Published: 21 May 2026 at 12:00 Europe/London
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Episode notes
This week on The Genetics Podcast, Patrick is joined by Dr. Vincent Dion, Group Leader at the UK Dementia Research Institute at Cardiff University. They discuss how repeat expansions drive Huntington’s disease and other neurological disorders, why DNA repair can sometimes worsen these mutations over time, and how CRISPR nickase editing could offer a new way to shrink disease-causing repeats rather than simply silence them.
Show Notes
0:00 Intro to The Genetics Podcast
01:00 Welcome to Paul
01:40 Long-read sequencing and ancestry-specific APOE4 risk in Alzheimer’s disease
04:20 Key findings from Paul’s study on a protective APOE4-linked variant in Alzheimer’s disease
10:58 What rare PSEN1 and PSEN2 variants reveal about Alzheimer’s disease biology
14:38 Disease-specific genetic mechanisms in ALS versus Alzheimer’s
17:14 Precision therapies for neurodegenerative disease
18:35 Choosing therapeutic targets in the neurodegenerative disease cascade
20:21 Landscape of ALS and Alzheimer’s therapies
23:48 Lessons from liver-directed gene therapy on microRNA toxicity, cancer risk, and brain delivery challenges
29:12 Using long-read sequencing to uncover tandem repeat expansions missed by conventional genomics
33:26 Findings from a study of long-read sequencing on ancient genomes
38:06 Closing remarks
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