Finding a treatment for CJD
What is PRN100?
World-leading research at the MRC Prion Unit at UCL developed an experimental antibody treatment called PRN100. This was designed to stop prions from malfunctioning in the brain.
A small number of patients were given PRN100 in an experimental treatment programme in 2018/2019 and PRN100 showed remarkably positive early-stage test results in humans.
The results of the experimental treatment programme were written up in an article published in The Lancet Neurology in April 2022. Read the full article here.
World-leading research
The MRC Prion Unit at University College London was established in 1997 at the government’s request in the wake of the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis (also known as Mad Cow Disease).
Since then, the Unit has spent decades building Britain’s world-leading expertise in prion research, and they believe that they have now finally found a cure for CJD.
PRN100 might not just cure CJD, but it could also be used in research for other neurological diseases causing dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease where closely similar processes leading to formation and spread of amyloids formed from different brain proteins is central to the disease process, and Parkinson’s disease.
The conditions to advance PRN100 are uniquely favourable. The majority of CJD patients in the UK have joined the MRC Unit’s long term clinical research programme, providing a wealth of comparative natural history data that means effective clinical trials can be conducted relatively quickly and efficiently with as few as 20 participants, far fewer than the many hundreds typically required in dementia research. This means the total funding needed is just £10 million, a small fraction of the cost of comparable research in Alzheimer’s disease for example.
The Cure CJD Campaign is committed to supporting research at the MRC Prion Unit at UCL to enable this to happen.
Professor John Collinge on a treatment for CJD
Professor John Collinge is head of the Department of Neurodegenerative Disease at the UCL Institute of Neurology. He is also director of the UK Medical Research Council’s Prion Unit, a highly multidisciplinary research unit focusing on human prion disease, and leads the NHS National Prion Clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, where he is an honorary consultant neurologist.
In this interview, John Collinge discusses a first-in-human treatment programme to give PRN100, an anti-prion-protein monoclonal antibody, to patients with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease; the report is published in the April 2022 issue of The Lancet Neurology.
We have raised £1 million so far
Thanks to our generous supporters, this is a great start, but much more is needed to continue vital research and help to make a viable treatment. With your help, we can reach our target.