BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

New PrPetrator in AD

April 2, 2009 7:00 AM UTC

Yale University researchers have uncovered a surprising link between Alzheimer's disease and the prion protein that has been linked to mad cow disease and the related human condition, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The team has reported that prion protein (PRNP; PrP), which itself forms aggregates in prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD), is one of the main cellular receptors for oligomeric b-amyloid (Ab), the toxic misfolded protein behind AD.1 Targeting the interaction between Ab and PrP could thus be a new tack against AD...