Agonists of prostaglandin E ₂ receptors as potential first in class treatment for nephronophthisis and related ciliopathies

Significance Juvenile nephronophthisis (NPH) is a renal ciliopathy due to a dysfunction of primary cilia for which no curative treatment is available. This paper describes the identification of agonists of prostaglandin E 2 receptors as a potential therapeutic approach for the most common NPHP1 -associated ciliopathies. We demonstrated that prostaglandin E 1 rescues defective ciliogenesis and ciliary composition in NPHP1 patient urine-derived renal tubular cells and improves ciliary and kidney phenotypes in our NPH zebrafish and Nphp1 −/− mouse models. In addition, Taprenepag alleviates the severe retinopathy observed in Nphp1 −/− mice. Finally, transcriptomic analyses pointed out several pathways downstream the prostaglandin receptors as cell cycle progression, extracellular matrix, or actin cytoskeleton organization. Altogether, our findings provide an alternative for treatment of NPH.