Functional Tests to Resolve Unsolved Rare Diseases. Rares.

Resolving Unsolved Rare Diseases : Functional Tests and New Diagnosis Strategy to Study Genetic Variants From High-throughput Sequencing (RID)

Rares diseases are a heterogeneous group of conditions which need important tools for diagnosis.

The use of high-throughput sequencing is able to diagnose half of the patients. For the other part it is impossible to conclude due to the presence of variants of unknown significance (VOUS). Functional analysis are needed to bring strong argument to reclassify variants as pathogenic or benign. The main objective is to evaluate the diagnosis yield of this strategy.

The main objective is the improvement of the diagnosis of rare genetic diseases. The investigator lab is expert for diagnosis of some rare diseases such as neurodevelopmental disorder, albinism, cystic fibrosis and congenital heart defect. Actually with implementation of high-throughput sequencing for diagnosis, a high number of genetic variants are found and need to be interpretated. The ACMG classification is used to classify variants with argument of variant frequency, predicted effect on protein and in-silico prediction. Functional evidence is a strong argument to help classify VOUS. The investigators propose the use of RNA-Seq, minigene and luciferase assay for study of VOUS to bring argument to classify them as benign or pathogenic.

Inclusion Criteria:

• Minor and adult patient.
• Registered for the social security system.
• Informed consent signed by patient or parent of a minor patient.
• Patient affected by one of the rare diseases studied (albinism, congenital heart defect, cystic fibrosis, neurodevelopmental disease)
• Patient bearing variants of unknown significance (VOUS)

Exclusion Criteria:

• Refusal to participate in research protocol.
• Patient under administrative supervision
• Pregnant or nursing women