Westaway, David
University of Alberta
Canada
PrP N-terminal sequences and biological endpoints in Prion and Alzheimer's Disease
CIHR
435,305
01/10/2012
5
Prion diseases such as mad cow are caused by a normal component of brain cells, the cellular prion protein, “PrPC”, folding into the wrong 3D shape. Interestingly we and others have described that PrPC participates in early chemical events in a different disease, Alzheimer’s, that also features cell-to-cell spread of a misfolded protein. In this work we have found that PrPC exists in three forms and that one form is especially relevant to how prion diseases occur and may also play a special role in the early events of Alzheimer’s. We will explore these concepts using petri dish and animal model experiments.