RHOA Is a Modulator of the Cholesterol-Lowering Effects of Statin

Although statin drugs are generally efficacious for lowering plasma LDL-cholesterol levels, there is considerable variability in response. To identify candidate genes that may contribute to this variation, we used an unbiased genome-wide filter approach that was applied to 10,149 genes expressed in immortalized lymphoblastoid cell lines (LCLs) derived from 480 participants of the Cholesterol and Pharmacogenomics (CAP) clinical trial of simvastatin. The criteria for identification of candidates included genes whose statin-induced changes in expression were correlated with change in expression of HMGCR, a key regulator of cellular cholesterol metabolism and the target of statin inhibition. This analysis yielded 45 genes, from which RHOA was selected for follow-up because it has been found to participate in mediating the pleiotropic but not the lipid-lowering effects of statin treatment. RHOA knock-down in hepatoma cell lines reduced HMGCR, LDLR, and SREBF2 mRNA expression and increased intracellular cholesterol ester content as well as apolipoprotein B (APOB) concentrations in the conditioned media. Furthermore, inter-individual variation in statin-induced RHOA mRNA expression measured in vitro in CAP LCLs was correlated with the changes in plasma total cholesterol, LDL-cholesterol, and APOB induced by simvastatin treatment (40 mg/d for 6 wk) of the individuals from whom these cell lines were derived. Moreover, the minor allele of rs11716445, a SNP located in a novel cryptic RHOA exon, dramatically increased inclusion of the exon in RHOA transcripts during splicing and was associated with a smaller LDL-cholesterol reduction in response to statin treatment in 1,886 participants from the CAP and Pravastatin Inflamation and CRP Evaluation (PRINCE; pravastatin 40 mg/d) statin clinical trials. Thus, an unbiased filter approach based on transcriptome-wide profiling identified RHOA as a gene contributing to variation in LDL-cholesterol response to statin, illustrating the power of this approach for identifying candidate genes involved in drug response phenotypes.