Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Prion disease is one of the scariest things I’ve learned about. I’m always careful not to eat meats from shady establishments.by slicktux
- It sadly sounds like it targets RNA for the production of all prion proteins (a somewhat important protein for normal brain function, but not essential) and doesn't do anything to clean up existing misfolded proteins. Even if successful, it will probably have side effects.
Looking at the list of observed changes in mice this can be anything from destroying the sleep cycle to general memory problems.
by rf15 - Prion diseases are one of the scarier things I've ever heard about. It is transmissible via fluids, but it can also just happen spontaneously in your body, and once that happens, it's basically a death sentence. There is so far still no cure.
If this works, this will be a game changer.
by lbourdages - I've seen prion disease up close with someone dear. I couldn't sleep thinking about what could have been going through their minds. It was 6 months of torture, and if I were in the same situation I'd have preferred someone switch me off.
I remember reading about Sonia Vallabh (and their race against time) - I'm so glad they're getting somewhere. Kudos.
by jeswin - I'm glad they are making some progress partly because my sister has ALS and there may be similar mechanisms - there seems to be some protein folding malfunction at play in that too. So far there's been very little progress with anything like that.
There was a youtube recently I think on the same trials https://youtu.be/wuXip1SCJGs
by tim333 - The most scary thing about prions is that they're inert. They're not even evil or agressive. They just are.
The mere shape of them causes cascading exponential system failures. And that shape happens to be very stable and requires a lot of energy to be broken up.
Like some kind of rock that falls from the sky or materializes out of thin air, and slowly the whole village turns into identical inanimate rocks.
by hypfer - Prion diseases include:
-in sheep, scrapie
-in humans, Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jacob
-in cows, BSE ("mad cow")
-in deer, Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD)
-in cats, feline spongiform encephalopathy
Scrapie is particularly known, deadly, and long-lived. The toxin proteins can survive for a decade in soil, and infect a new host years after it emerged.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...
by chasil - In case anyone hasn't seen it, the story behind this couple is interesting:by creata