New research conducted by the National Institutes of Health's Rocky Mountain Laboratories in Hamilton may shed some light on the inner-workings of brain-wasting diseases, including Alzheimer's disease.

Byron Caughey, a senior investigator at the lab, and his partner in science, tenure-track investigator Gerald Baron, recently discovered how rogue proteins that cause diseases like mad cow and chronic wasting in deer and elk travel through brain cells.

They also discovered that the protein that causes Alzheimer's travels through brain cells the same way.

"If you learn about how these infectious agents are transported, it can suggest ways of preventing that spread," Caughey said. "We're excited to finally be able to see, almost in real time, the process by which these infectious chunks of protein can invade cells."

The scientists spent the last two years studying how the proteins that cause scrapie - a wasting disease similar to mad cow disease that affects sheep - travel through the brain cells of mice and hamsters.

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Source: Missoulian.com
May 25, 2005

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