Innovation Anthology #303:
The concentrated effort on prion diseases over the last five years has led to some
significant discoveries, although there is still much work to be done.
Dr. Stephen Moore is an expert in bovine genomics at the University of Alberta . He’s been looking at genes and gene pathways that affect the susceptibility of cattle to Mad Cow disease.
DR. STEPHEN MOORE: In the future we may be able to breed animals that are less susceptible. Whether or not they’ll be completely resistant to disease we don’t know. But really what happened in the UK was in many ways for the research of prion disease, an opportunity. Of course, we will never have that level of infection again in a prion disease, apart from in the wild population of animals in North America. And the wild populations in North America are very difficult to use as a controlled study because you don’t know much about any particular animal when it does come down. So we’ll be looking at refining our results in order to get a better handle on what’s actually happening in the progression of that disease.
With a test on live animals for prion disease still a long ways off, Dr. Moore believes controlling the spread of disease is a more immediate concern.
Thanks today to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
FOR INNOVATION ANTHOLOGY
I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
Guest
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Sponsor
Canadian Institutes of Health Research
Program Date: 2010-04-01