Abstract
In the United-Kingdom, ≈1 of 2,000 persons could be infected with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). Therefore, risk of transmission of vCJD by medical procedures remains a major concern for public health authorities. In this study, we used in vitro amplification of prions by protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) to estimate distribution and level of the vCJD agent in 21 tissues from 4 patients who died of clinical vCJD and from 1 asymptomatic person with vCJD. PMCA identified major levels of vCJD prions in a range of tissues, including liver, salivary gland, kidney, lung, and bone marrow. Bioassays confirmed that the quantitative estimate of levels of vCJD prion accumulation provided by PMCA are indicative of vCJD infectivity levels in tissues. Findings provide critical data for the design of measures to minimize risk for iatrogenic transmission of vCJD.
Highlights
To cite this version: Jean-Yves Douet, Caroline Lacroux, Naima Aron, Mark W Head, Séverine Lugan, et al
When we took into account the 4-fold lower amount of material used to seed the protein misfolding cyclic amplification (PMCA) reaction compared with material used in mouse inoculations, we found that the PMCA protocol used was 465 times more sensitive than the bioassay of tgBov mice for detection of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) prions
Data obtained in this study clearly demonstrate the presence of vCJD prions in a wide and unexpected variety of peripheral tissues
Summary
To cite this version: Jean-Yves Douet, Caroline Lacroux, Naima Aron, Mark W Head, Séverine Lugan, et al. PMCA reactions seeded with tissues from the 4 symptomatic vCJD patients were positive for PrPres (Table 4; Figure 2).
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