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Prion Safety Laboratory Swipe Test
Published on: February 14, 2025
On the horizon: a blood test for prions
Surachai Supattapone1, James C Geoghegan, Judy R Rees
1Department of Biochemistry, Dartmouth Medical School, Hanover, NH 03755, USA. supattapone@dartmouth.edu
Trends in Microbiology
|February 18, 2006
Abstract:
A recent paper by Castilla et al. reported the detection of prions in the blood of scrapie-infected hamsters using a biochemical amplification method that is conceptually analogous to the polymerase chain reaction. This technological advance raises the possibility that prion diseases in humans and livestock could soon be diagnosed using blood samples if several technical limitations can be overcome.

