The work was published last week in the journal Nature Medicine and was immediately hailed as a “landmark” and “breakthrough,” something that had been pursued but not found for over 15 years. “They hit pay dirt,” said prion researcher Dr. Paul Brown with the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
A version of the vaccine for cattle and a possible Mad Cow diagnostic test for the animals are both under development by Montreal-based Caprion Pharmaceuticals and may be less than a year away. The experimental vaccine is probably not destined for use in humans to prevent the human version of this ailment, known as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD). “You wouldn’t want to vaccinate every person against a disease that only affects about one in a million,” Cashman noted. However, the antibodies produced by this research might be used for patients diagnosed with the disease as a treatment, with injections resulting in the mopping up of prions in an afflicted brain to prevent further damage.
Mad Cow Disease infected British cattle in the 1990s. Over a million cows were destroyed there to bring the disease under control, but not before contaminated British beef was consumed by thousands of humans, leading to a still-ongoing outbreak of fatal vCJD among British citizens. Recent discovery of Mad Cow Disease in a Canadian beef herd has threatened a similar scenario in that country and in the United States, which imports billions of dollars of Canadian beef annually.