« Vietnam on typhoon alert | Main | MRS: it's all over »

Could RNA interfere with prion disease?

Genetic treatment shows promise against scrapie.

Prion diseases have become the newest target for treatment with RNA interference (RNAi). The gene-silencing technique has been used to prolong the lives of mice infected with scrapie, a disease similar to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD).

Read the story here.

Posted by Nicola Jones on December 1, 2006 10:00 PM |

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://blogs.nature.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/1547

Comments

It is an exciting development. I think the next step would be to extend the technique to introduce conditional knock down of the prion gene in the brain (in the event of infectious prion reaching the brain)

Posted by: Babunilayam Gangadharan | December 3, 2006 10:24 AM

Check out this latest development!!! This is the next step to creating an externally delievered treatment for Prion disease. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/34119/title/The_two_faces_of_prion_proteins

Posted by: Michael Farmer | July 15, 2008 02:44 PM

Post a comment

Comments will be reviewed by staff before being published. You can be as critical or controversial as you like, but please don't get personal or offensive, and do keep it brief. Excessively long entries may be cropped. Remember this is for feedback and discussion - not for publishing papers or press releases.

We strongly encourage you to use your real, full name. Email addresses are required: this is just in case we need to discuss your comment with you privately. They won’t be published.


Please enter the numbers you see below - this helps us to cut down on spam. Note that attempting to post within 30 seconds of hitting ‘preview’ or ‘post’ can cause the system to think you are spamming the site. If you are having trouble with this system, you can instead e-mail a comment to 'inthefield at nature.com'.

Search