In a previous post I introduced the biology of gene therapy and reviewed the major efforts in prion gene therapy to date. The present post will explore a few aspects of prion gene therapy in greater detail. antisense oligonucleotides: probably … Continue reading
Recently I’ve become interested in depleting PrP as a strategy for treating prion diseases. There are several different places to try to intervene in PrP’s life cycle, the earliest of which is transcription. Therefore this post aims to summarize what … Continue reading
This post will review what is known about PrP glycosylation and its role (if any) in prion diseases, and will examine whether glycosylation represents a potential therapeutic target for treating these diseases. what is glycosylation? Glycosylation is the attachment of sugar … Continue reading
As of today, no drug, supplement or lifestyle measure has been shown to delay onset of the genetic prion diseases – familial Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (fCJD), Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI) and Gerstmann Straussler Scheinker syndrome (GSS). Those of us carrying these … Continue reading
A hot topic of research for the last 4 years has been the significance of PrP’s interactions with Aβ. It seems universally agreed that PrP binds to some species of Aβ oligomers (Aβo), but the claims that PrP thereby mediates Alzheimer’s … Continue reading
In SQL there is a function called coalesce, which accepts any number of columns and returns the first non-null value in each row, reading across the columns in the order they’re passed in. This is super useful when you’re trying … Continue reading
These are notes from lecture 12 of Harvard Extension’s Cell Biology course. what are stem cells A stem cell is a cell with two key properties: self-renewal differentiation In other words, they can divide to form more stem cells or to form … Continue reading
In an earlier post on how to calculate heritability, two of the models I discussed rely on correlating the phenotypes of related individuals: sib-sib correlation and parent-offspring regression. In each case, you can compare two individuals who are expected to … Continue reading
These are notes from lecture 11 of Harvard Extension’s Cell Biology course. This lecture will cover two different ways cells can die: apoptosis (programmed cell death) and necrosis (unplanned cell death). It is easy to tell these two apart morphologically under the microscope, … Continue reading
A new compound, anle138b, has recently been touted as the most promising anti-prion drug candidate yet discovered [Wagner 2013 (ft, supp1, supp2)]. And rightly so: it is orally bioavailable, crosses the blood-brain barrier, shows no toxicity in animals even at enormous doses, and has … Continue reading