A special focus issue on the materials of Prion 2011 meeting in Montreal Canada

摘要

Founded in 2007 and having completed its 5th year by now, is no longer a toddler, and is increasingly conscious of its international role in the promulgation of prion science. In keeping with this notion, this special issue marks an intercontinental prion conference held in the lovely venue of Montreal in May 2011, the outcome of a fruitful collaboration between PrioNet Canada, the European NeuroPrion Association, and the Alberta Prion Research Institute—three centers of excellence in prion diseases. The first such meeting convened outside of Europe, the conference theme was called “The New World”—not only for its location in North America, but for the novel scientific territory it embraced, especially the prion-like propagated misfolding mechanism applied to common neurological, psychiatric and systemic diseases. The application of prion ideas to Alzheimer, Parkinson and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis is now leading to new therapies and biomarker discovery—but also to new concerns about public health. This theme was emphasized by the plenary talk, presented by Stan Prusiner, a founder of prion concept, and focused on the burgeoning neurobehavioral epidemic linked to multiple concussions—including professional athletes—and characterized pathologically by a frontotemporal tauopathy. Claudio Soto, one of the pioneers of the in vitro assays for prion propagation, also presented startling work indicating that the cerebral amyloidosis of Alzheimer disease can be transmitted through blood transfusion, at least in experimental models. Dr Soto also showed that the pancreatic amyloidosis of type II diabetes is transmissible, again in experimental models. It will take a decade or more for the research community to fully understand the potential human health threats posed by these important discoveries, through careful experimentation and well-designed epidemiologic studies. Another highlight of the Montreal meeting was a roundtable retrospective of Soto’s protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) entitled “Back to the Future,” which captured much of the validation and promise of the technique since it was originally published in in 2001. This scientific roundtable, involving Claudio, Byron Caughey and Jean-Philippe Deslys, was more informative, although perhaps less entertaining, than Paul Brown’s suggestion to the organizers to contract The Village People to sing “PMCA!”