NR ASDC
AU Meikle,J.
TI London to get research centre to lead the fight against CJD
QU The Guardian, Wednesday October 28, 1998
IA http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/28/29748.html und http://reports.guardian.co.uk/articles/1998/10/28/p-29748.html
VT
The struggle to identify, understand and treat human BSE moved up a gear yesterday with the announcement of an international research centre to look at the disease.
The programme of the London unit will include developing tests on blood and tonsils to help early diagnosis of the fatal condition, and warning the Government if the disease becomes epidemic.
The centre has been guaranteed long-term funding. It will co-ordinate and support other researchers, and also work on other diseases thought to be caused by the prions, or rogue proteins which destroy their healthy neighbours.
The unit will be headed by John Collinge, of St Mary's Hospital and Imperial College, London, whose research group is already a world leader. Another specialist, Charles Weissman from Zürich, will join the team next March.
At first, new laboratories will be built at Professor Collinge's base at St Mary's, but another London site is being considered for the unit, which will be largely funded through the government's Medical Research Council.
Prof Collinge said yesterday: "I have tried to build a critical mass of people to tackle the problem of human prion diseases. Until recently we have had to weld together a lot of separate research grants... and we had reached the point where you don't do any science anymore, you write grant applications."
The unit will have about 60 staff. Early work will include developing tonsil checks for potential victims of human bovine spongiform encephalopathy, officially known as new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, to see whether the prions are present.
Prof Collinge said tests on about 20 patients so far had been positive. These tests provide far less of a shock to the system than brain biopsies, which cannot give final confirmation of human BSE. This has to wait until a brain examination after death.
In addition, researchers have begun collecting thousands of tonsils removed from normal patients in routine operations to see if they can find the proteins. Prof Collinge hoped he would find none, but "failure would tell scientists nothing reassuring, while small numbers would be worrying". Even one in a 1,000 might indicate 50,000 of the country's 50 million population suffering the disease.
Twenty-nine people have so far probably died from eating infected beef in the late 1980s, but Prof Collinge said: "I would not be reassured by the small number of cases so far. It is an extremely long incubation period for humans."
The unit will seek other blood-based, and trustworthy human BSE tests - considered vital to protect transfusions - and drugs to combat the so-far incurable disase.
By James Meikle
(c) Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998
SP englisch