I really enjoyed our class last week! It was great to finally utilize the scientific method in our case analysis and interesting to see how much collaboration was required between two fields I had never really realized were that similar, namely Anthropology and Medicine.
As we learned in class, Prion is actually a naturally occurring protein that is found in all of us. Only when it gets ‘infected’ does it change form, and start infecting the other Prion proteins around it. I found an interesting article online that said that researchers at The Scripps Research Institute, in studying Prion disease were actually able to discover a killing mechanism that could underpin the range of most intractable neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers, Parkinson’s and ALS.
In this study, scientists studied the misfolded form of the Prion disease protein (TPrP) and demonstrated that it induces neuronal death by depleting NAD+, a metabolite that is important in cellular energy production and homeostastis. Restoring NAD+ was thus critical to rescue the neurons subjected to TPrP injury. The loss of NAD+ is also indicative in other neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons.
However, this study was conducted on animals but does show that a treatment is in the works, even though these are just the early stages.
Link to the study: http://www.bovinevetonline.com/news/animal-health/scripps-scientists-discover-key-mechanism-prion-diseases
This is really interesting, it looks like that by restoring NAD+ we may be able to cure Alzheimers and other neurological disorders! I’m excited to hear what other studies are conducted and how this research develops.