Preventing Prions

Vallabh and Minikel report that treating susceptible individuals while they are still healthy offers the best hope for warding off a deadly brain disease: prion disease. This illness occurs when a protein called PrP that is normally present in our brains changes shape into an abnormal form, called a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inScientific American Vol. 322; no. 3; p. 55
Main Authors Vallabh, Sonia Minikel, Minikel, Eric Vallabh
Format Magazine Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Scientific American, Incorporated 01.03.2020
Subjects
Brain
Brain diseases
Drug development
Medical treatment
Nervous system
Neurodegeneration
Neurodegenerative diseases
Prion protein
Prions
Protein folding
Proteins
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Summary:Vallabh and Minikel report that treating susceptible individuals while they are still healthy offers the best hope for warding off a deadly brain disease: prion disease. This illness occurs when a protein called PrP that is normally present in our brains changes shape into an abnormal form, called a prion. A prion causes other copies of PrP that it touches to also warp into prions. This cascade of protein misfolding spreads across the brain, killing brain cells at a rate that outstrips that of any other neurodegenerative disease. They need a new paradigm in drug development: testing promising drugs not only for their ability to slow the progression of disease but also for their ability to keep healthy brains healthy for longer. For all the progress in modern neuroscience, every human brain remains unspeakably and unknowably complex, an interconnected network of almost 100 billion neurons we do not understand, cannot fix and cannot possibly replace.
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ObjectType-Feature-1
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ISSN:0036-8733
1946-7087