There are three ways prion diseases occur. Sometimes they arise without apparent cause. For example, about one person in a million inexplicably comes down with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, which affects the brain. Prion diseases occasionally run in families. The third route is an infection, caused when people ingest or are internally exposed to contaminated material from the central nervous system.
Animals are most likely to infect animals of the same species.
There is no treatment. But Dr. Frangione's new report says that medicines may one day be possible. The researchers reversed the abnormal prion protein by calling upon a molecule known as a beta-sheet breaker peptide. When iPrP13 was mixed with the abnormal prion protein from the brains of mice and people, researchers found that the protein became normal again. They also performed experiments to see whether abnormal brain material mixed with iPrP13 was just as infectious as abnormal brain material without it.