Researcher

Stanley Prusiner

Profile

Stanley Prusiner is an American neurologist and biochemist at the University of California San Francisco who received the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of prions—a new biological principle of infection based entirely on proteins, without any nucleic acid. Prusiner demonstrated that prions are misfolded forms of the normal cellular prion protein (PrPC) that propagate by inducing native protein to adopt the same misfolded conformation. This discovery explained a class of fatal neurodegenerative diseases including scrapie in sheep, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, fatal familial insomnia, and bovine spongiform encephalopathy in humans. Prion biology has since had profound implications for understanding protein aggregation diseases more broadly, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and ALS, where similar prion-like spreading of misfolded proteins (tau, alpha-synuclein, TDP-43) is increasingly recognized. Prusiner's laboratory continues to develop anti-prion compounds and to investigate prion-like mechanisms in common neurodegenerative diseases, making his work of direct interest to pharmaceutical companies developing therapies for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

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