prion

Sonia Vallabh lost her mother to a rare brain disease in 2010, and then learned she had inherited the same genetic mutation. She and her husband, Eric Minikel, went back to school to study the family of illnesses — prion diseases — in the hope of find

A Couple's Quest To Stop A Rare Disease Before It Takes One Of Them

4:33pm June 19, 2017

by Rae Ellen Bichell

Twenty years. That's how long two grad students, Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel, think they have before a deadly disease envelops Sonia's brain. The Massachusetts couple is now racing to find a cure.

Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease is a very rare and fatal disease that causes normal proteins in the brain to start misfolding, like misshapen origami — ultimately leading to holes and shrinkage in the brain.

Prion Test For Rare, Fatal Brain Disease Helps Families Cope

11:24am February 06, 2017

by Rae Ellen Bichell

Scientists now have a fairly noninvasive way to test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare form of dementia. A similar test, they say, might offer earlier diagnoses of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.

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Biomedical researchers are amassing huge amounts of patient data but are having trouble making sense of the information.

Big Data Coming In Faster Than Biomedical Researchers Can Process It

6:28pm November 28, 2016

by Richard Harris

There's a plethora of projects to gather data about the brain, various kinds of cancer and every type of cell in the body. But researchers are struggling to keep up with the information explosion.

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In 1962, a local leader in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea asks Fore men to stop the sorcery that he believes is killing women and children.

When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged

4:50pm September 06, 2016

by Rae Ellen Bichell

For decades, a rare disease crawled across Papua New Guinea. When scientists realized what was behind kuru, it caught everyone by surprise. But similar diseases can still be transmitted through food.

Prion protein can be infectious, spreading from cell to cell in the brain. Here four nerve cells in a mouse illustrate how infectious prion protein moves within cells along neurites — wire-like connections the nerve cells use for communicating with adja

Mad Cow Research Hints At Ways To Halt Alzheimer's, Parkinson's

9:18am March 10, 2015

by Jon Hamilton

Corinne Lasmezas began her career studying a disease that destroys the brains of cattle. Now she's using what she learned to search for drugs that can stop human brain diseases.

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