Citing Safety, French Institutions Temporarily Halt Prion Research

[Judi Lynn]

The three-month moratorium comes after a former prion researcher was diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Stephanie Melchor
Jul 28, 2021

On Tuesday (July 27), five public research institutions in France announced they will suspend research on prions for three months. According to their joint press release, the decision was spurred by a case of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in someone who may have been exposed to prions in a research lab.

According to Science, CJD is the most common prion disease in humans. Prions are infectious misfolded proteins that cause other proteins to misfold and aggregate in the brain. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defines two types of CJD: classical, which generally arises through spontaneous protein misfolding in the brain, and variant CJD (vCJD), which is believed to be caused by exposure to the same prion that causes mad cow disease. There are no vaccines or treatments for CJD, which is universally fatal. The type of CJD can only be diagnosed by examining postmortem brain tissue.

An anonymous source tells Science that the woman newly diagnosed with CJD used to work in a prion lab in Toulouse. The woman is still alive, and doctors don’t know if she has classical or variant CJD.

“This is the right way to go in the circumstances,” structural biologist Ronald Melki—who works at a prion lab jointly operated by two of the French institutions adopting the moratorium, The French Alternative Energies Commission and the French National Centre for Scientific Research—tells Science. “It is always wise to ask questions about the whole working process when something goes wrong.” The other institutions participating in the moratorium are the French Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety; the National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE); and Inserm.

More:
https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/citing-safety-french-institutions-temporarily-halt-prion-research-69032

[-misanthroptimist]

1. Prion disease gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies for some reason.

It just seems like something that came out of a horror movie rather than something that should actually exist in nature.