Tagging Prions with Green Fluorescent Protein: A Novel Method for Visualizing Prion Neuroinvasion

David A. Harris, M.D., Ph.D.

Washington University

Funded in September, 2008: $200000 for 3 years


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Determining how Deadly “Prions” Travel to the Brain from Immune Staging Areas in the Body

Investigators will study animal models to learn how deadly prions—misfolded proteins that are infectious in animals and humans—travel from immune sites in the body to the brain.

Prions aggregate and produce deadly infections in the brain.  They are responsible for mad cow disease in cattle, scrapie in sheep, and fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and kuru in humans.  In some cases, humans have developed the disease by eating infected beef or through blood transfusions or organ transplants.  It takes a long time following exposure for cognitive and motor symptoms to develop, because prions must first travel from peripheral sites in the body to the brain. There, they infect brain cells, generating additional copies of the misfolded protein in a relentlessly progressive domino effect that spreads the infection to cells throughout the brain.





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David A. Harris, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Harris is currently a Professor of Cell Biology and Physiology at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.  He received his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia University, and subsequently carried out postdoctoral research in molecular neurobiology at Columbia University and Washington University.  Dr. Harris has spent his career studying the cellular and molecular biology of an unusual group of neurodegenerative disorders known as prion diseases, which are caused by a misfolded protein that has the novel property of being infectious.

His laboratory is particularly interested in how prions kill nerve cells, and his work has shown how the pathogenesis of prion diseases bears strikingly similarities to the processes underlying other neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease.