Projects Profile
Project Title
Development of a blood based test screen for transmissible spongiform encephalopathies
Partnership
Mourad Tayebi from Royal Veterinary College, University of London
Deming Zhao from China Agricultural University
Project Aim
The proposed research project is expected to lead to the development of a blood-based prion diagnosis for animals and humans that could be used to detect infection before the development of clinical disease as well as acting as an aid to clinical diagnosis.
Inspiration for the projects
Currently there is no diagnostic test available for the detection of prions sub-clinically. Current methods are only able to detect prions in brains following post-mortem and these tests rely on time-consuming and complicated protocols such us Western blotting.
This partnership with our Chinese collaborators would lead to the development of a blood based pre-symptomatic diagnostic for prion diseases, including sheep, cattle and human. Such advances will be essential for the management of this serious livestock and public health concern
Commercial Potential and Further Development
This partnership with our Chinese partners would lead to significant outputs, namely:
Novel diagnostic tools that will for the first time be able to detect prions in blood in asymptomatic cases. This will also provide a differential diagnosis for sheep BSE (i.e. BSE strain strain known to be transmitted to sheep) and atypical scrapie.
More importantly, using the reagents generated in this project would lead to field studies on the spread of scrapie in sheep and to the design of new and appropriate disease control measures. More importantly, the project would potentially lead to the assessment of the size of the vCJD epidemic worldwide and provide a more precise number of human incubating the disease.
