Release date: 2016-12-26

The "mad cow disease" that killed more than 200 people in Europe reached its peak more than a decade ago, but the threat it poses remains true. Eating meat contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy and its iconic malformed protein - prion - can cause fatal and incurable brain diseases, variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Thousands of Europeans are carriers of the virus and can spread prions by donating blood. Therefore, researchers have been trying to protect the blood supply for many years.

This week, the two teams are closer to success. They describe a highly accurate method of detecting prions in the blood. “The new technology looks promising,” said Jonathan Wadsworth, a biochemist at the University College London who studies prion diseases. “These are very popular.

Analysis of discarded appendix and tonsil samples showed that in the UK, one in 2000 had misfolded variants of the abnormal prion-natural protein that promoted the folding and abnormal accumulation of healthy proteins around. The incubation period is up to 50 years, once the symptoms occur – first of all, depression and hallucinations, eventually leading to dementia and loss of exercise capacity – the patient survives for about a year. It is now known that four people have infected vCJD through blood transfusions from infected donors.

However, screening for prions is difficult because they are rare in the blood. Both new tests described online in scientific translational medicine rely on the amplification of prions by culturing them with normal proteins and then agitating with sonic waves. This process breaks the new agglomerated malformed protein, which converts its neighboring proteins more efficiently. “Everyone can be used as a seed to make this response index faster,” said Claudio Soto, a neurobiologist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at McGovern Medical School in Houston. Technology.

In their new article, Soto and his team tested their methods for blood from 14 vCJD patients and 137 controls. This test was positive in all vCJD patients. The second study, led by microbiologist Daisy Bougard of the University of Montpellier, France, used the same amplification technique, but first captured the prion from the sample with magnetic nanobeads. This technique marks 18 vCJD patients in 256 samples. It also detected prions in the blood donated by two vCJD patients. “This is very encouraging,” Wadsworth said.

However, neither study analyzed enough samples to predict the false positive rate of millions of samples in the blood bank. Wadsworth pointed out: "We have this dilemma - how do we tell people that they may be fatal when we don't know if the test is specific? The disease?" Because the UK receives more than 2 million blood donations each year, he said that a low false positive rate may exhaust the donor pool. The two teams are now working hard to verify their testing of the larger sample set.

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Source: Noble

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