PRION RESEARCH | New Lead for Sporadic CJD Cause
A recent murine study suggests that the sporadic form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) might be caused by meat infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The work of prion specialist John Collinge, Kings College, London, contradicts the prior consensus of the prion community, which held that only the variant form of CJD (vCJD) can be attributed to BSE-infected beef, with the sporadic causes arising spontaneously (J. Collinge et al., "BSE prions propagate as either variant CJD-like or sporadic CJD-like prion strains in transgenic mice expressing human prion protein," EMBO J, 21:6358-66, December 2002). Such a finding would help explain why the number of cases of sporadic CJD in the UK has been increasing as quickly as the incidence of vCJD cases.
The experiments found that when transgenic mice expressing the human prion protein, PrP methionine 129, were inoculated with either BSE or vCJD ...
