Crucial Protein Role in Deadly Prion Spread

A research team from Brown University has indentified a single protein that plays a major role in deadly prion diseases by smashing up clusters of these infectious proteins, creating the “seeds� that allow fatal brain illnesses to quickly spread. The findings are exciting, researchers say, because they might reveal a way to control the spread of prions through drug intervention. If a drug could be made that inhibits this fragmentation process, it could substantially slow the spread of prions, which cause mad cow disease and scrapie in animals and, in rare cases, Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease and kuru in humans.
Because similar protein replication occurs in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, such a drug could also slow progression of these diseases as well.