This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
Investigators awarded $11 million to research transmissible prion diseases
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Investigators from McGovern Medical School at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston received $11 million in funding from the NIH to study the pathogenesis, transmission and detection of prion diseases that can potentially affect humans, according to a press release.
Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies are a result of prions, which are protein-based infectious agents. These infections are all fatal to the brain, including bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad cow disease, in cattle; scrapie in sheep; Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease in humans; and chronic wasting disease in deer, elk and moose. The incubation periods for these diseases range from years to decades.
“Prion diseases are rare but because of their incurability, lethality and potential to spread from animals to humans, we need to better understand them from how they replicate to the development of efficient detection methods,” Claudio Soto, PhD, principal investigator and director of The George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Research in Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Brain Disorders at UTHealth, said in the release.
Soto and an investigator team from Colorado State University previously published NIH-funded laboratory research that stated grass plants can bind, uptake and transport infectious prions from contaminated soil. Different parts of grass plants act as carriers for infectivity, suggesting they are active in the horizontal transmission of prion diseases.
Soto and colleagues’ new research will focus on chronic wasting disease in the laboratory and the environment as it is transmitted among animals. The researchers will analyze the zoonotic potential of the disease and factors that may affect the resistance of humans to that transfer.
Disclosure: Soto reports no relevant financial disclosures.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts