All right, so I was poking around the BBC's news sites yesterday, and I came across a very cool article. (I'll stick a link to it in this post). I was on the Health page, and I saw a headline for new research concerning Creutzfeldt-Jakobs Disease, or CJD. CJD is, like the little topic discription says, pretty much Mad Cow Disease for humans. When you have CJD, it affects the proteins in your brain. Basically, when you're healthy, your brain proteins make other proteins that are folded properly and carry out their specific functions. When you're infected with or develop CJD, a protein enters your brain that is improperly folded. This one protein goes to a bunch of other proteins and refolds them to match itself, and then the misfolded ones go and do the same thing... and pretty soon, your brain is just full of gunk- the misfolded proteins that don't do anything. As of right now, there is no cure for this disease (and it is indeed fatal), because the misfolded proteins are very resistant to being degraded, which is why a drug for it hasn't been developed yet.
I learned all that info in biology this semester, and it all looked pretty hopeless, until I came across the bbc article. In it, researchers were able to stop the production of new normal proteins in the brains of mice who have an equivalent of CJD, so there will not be a continuous supply of new proteins for the bad ones to have their way with and misfold. It's no sure guarantee, and the researchers admit that it's many years away from even possibly being applied to humans with this disease, but still... I found it to be a pretty cool new bit of research.
article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/6198072.stmWhat do you guys think about it?
