Enhanced expression of a furin-cleavable proinsulin

Cell engineering or gene therapy may represent an alternative to current methods of treating diabetes mellitus. Cells could be engineered to secrete insulin ex vivo for transplantation or the insulin gene could be administered directly by injection into muscle. A problem has been that non-neuroendocrine cells lack the endoproteases (PC3/1 and PC2) that are responsible for the processing of proinsulin to insulin. This can be surmounted by engineering the paired basic amino acid processing sites within proinsulin to sites that would be recognized by the ubiquitously expressed protease, furin. However, in every study to date, the expression of the furin-cleavable construct was greatly reduced relative to that of the unmodified proinsulin construct. We investigated possible causes for this, including mRNA stability, the presence of additional CpG islands, and the amino acid substitutions within furin-cleavable proinsulin. Several furin-cleavable rat proinsulin I cDNAs were engineered and used to transfect human HEK293, rat L6 and mouse C(2)C(12) cell lines. The stability of wild-type and furin-cleavable proinsulin mRNA in transfected C(2)C(12) cells was measured by RT-PCR. Comparison of the decay rates in the presence of actinomycin D showed no significant difference between the two species of mRNA. A furin-cleavable proinsulin cDNA was created to contain the same distribution of CpG islands as wild-type proinsulin. Comparison of insulin-like immunoreactivity in all three cell lines transfected with either this construct or a widely used furin-cleavable proinsulin containing additional CpG islands showed that the presence of the extra CpG islands had no effect. Studies to examine amino acid substitutions used to create furin consensus sequences showed that the addition of basic residues at the C-peptide/A-chain junction was responsible for the reduced production of furin-cleavable proinsulin. Using this information, we engineered a cDNA for furin-cleavable rat proinsulin I that was efficiently processed to mature insulin and expressed at the same level as wild-type proinsulin.