Can you catch dementia? Insights and solutions from prion disease
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John Collinge, M.D.
Professor of Neurology
University College London
Summary
Professor Collinge leads a highly multidisciplinary research unit dedicated to understanding prion diseases. Prions are notorious “protein-only” infectious agents devoid of genes which cause invariably fatal brain diseases following silent incubation periods which may span a human lifetime. The diseases can arise spontaneously, by infection or be inherited. Remarkably, prions are composed of a cloud of self-propagating assemblies of a misfolded cellular protein that can encode information, generate neurotoxicity and evolve and adapt in vivo. There are increasing parallels with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative conditions involving brain deposition of polymers of misfolded proteins. His work focusses on molecular mechanisms of prion propagation, strain diversity and neurotoxicity and their wider relevance to commoner neurodegenerative diseases. He has a particular interest in therapeutics of prion and Alzheimer’s disease and he is developing both small molecule and immunotherapeutics.
This page was last updated on Wednesday, August 11, 2021