Case report: Novel compound heterozygous IL1RN mutations as the likely cause of a lethal form of deficiency of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist

Undiagnosed monogenic diseases represent a challenging group of human conditions highly suspicious to have a genetic origin, but without conclusive evidences about it. We identified two brothers born prematurely from a non-consanguineous healthy couple, with a neonatal-onset, chronic disease characterized by severe skin and bone inflammatory manifestations and a fatal outcome in infancy. We conducted DNA and mRNA analyses in the patients' healthy relatives to identify the genetic cause of the patients' disease. DNA analyses were performed by both Sanger and next-generation sequencing, which identified two novel heterozygous variants: the intronic c.318 + 2T>G variant in the father and a ≈2,600-bp intragenic deletion in the mother. mRNA production was markedly decreased in both progenitors when compared with healthy subjects. The mRNA sequencing performed in each parent identified two novel, truncated transcripts. Additional experiments revealed a perfect intrafamilial phenotype-genotype segregation following an autosomal recessive inheritance pattern. The evidences shown here supported for the presence of two novel (LoF) pathogenic variants in the analyzed family. Biallelic LoF variants at the gene cause the deficiency of interleukin-1 receptor antagonist (DIRA), a monogenic autoinflammatory disease with marked similarities with the patients described here. Despite the non-availability of the patients' samples representing the main limitation of this study, the collected evidences strongly suggest that the patients described here suffered from a lethal form of DIRA likely due to a compound heterozygous genotype at , thus providing a reliable genetic diagnosis based on the integration of old medical information with currently obtained genetic data.