This technology is a pharmaceutical composition, veterinary composition, and feed additive for the prevention and treatment of prion diseases that inhibits the aggregation of abnormal prion proteins by containing both aspirin and the protease plasmin as active ingredients. Aspirin enhances plasmin activity, thereby blocking the process by which normal prion proteins convert into the disease-causing form.
Prion diseases are infectious neurodegenerative disorders occurring in humans and animals, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, mad cow disease, scrapie, and chronic wasting disease, for which there have been no known treatments. The core of the disease is the conversion of normal cellular prion proteins into an abnormal form, which then aggregate to form amyloid, but there have been no effective means to prevent this conversion and aggregation.
This technology is configured so that plasmin alpha-cleaves the neurotoxic region of normal prion proteins to reduce the material available for conversion into the disease-causing form, while aspirin promotes this action of plasmin to inhibit both the generation and aggregation of abnormal prions. It utilizes aspirin, which has been widely used for fever, pain, and thrombosis prevention, for a new purpose. It can be applied to treatments for human prion diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, veterinary medicines for mad cow disease and scrapie, and feed additives for preventing infection in cattle, sheep, and deer, thereby delaying the spread and onset of prion diseases in both humans and livestock for which no treatments previously existed.
This invention was developed through support from the Ministry of Health and Welfare for the development and validation of in vitro and cell-based systems for evaluating the efficacy of prion therapeutics.
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