INTERRUPTING the immune system may eventually lead to treatments for
Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease. Two separate teams of researchers have discovered
that a particular immune process helps prion proteins cause diseases such as BSE,
scrapie and vCJD. One of the teams has managed to block with the process using
cobra venom.
Prion infections generally start when the victim eats or is injected with
material from an infected animal. The deformed prion that causes the disease
must hijack its host’s cells to replicate. In scrapie, the prions’ targets are
certain spleen cells that normally gather up foreign molecules which the immune
system has…
