Vaccination strategies

Currently all prion diseases are without effective treatment and are universally fatal. It is increasingly being recognized that the pathogenesis of many neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer disease (AD), includes "prion-like" properties. Hence, any effective therapeutic intervention for prion disease could have significant implications for other neurodegenerative diseases. Conversely, therapies that are effective in AD might also be therapeutically beneficial for prion disease. AD-like prion disease has no effective therapy. However, various vaccine and immunomodulatory approaches have shown great success in animal models of AD, with numerous ongoing clinical trials of these potential immunotherapies. More limited evidence suggests that immunotherapies may be effective in prion models and in naturally occurring prion disease. In particular, experimental data suggest that mucosal vaccination against prions can be effective for protection against orally acquired prion infection. Many prion diseases, including natural sheep scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, chronic wasting disease, and variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, are thought to be acquired peripherally, mainly by oral exposure. Mucosal vaccination would be most applicable to this form of transmission. In this chapter we review various immunologically based strategies which are under development for prion infection.