The Medical Research Council (MRC) has developed an accurate blood test for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD). It is hoped that the prototype, which is said to be 100,000 times more sensitive than any previous attempt, will transform the diagnosis and screening of the brain disease.
The MRC Prion Unit research team, based at University College London, working with the National Prion Clinic at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery (NHNN), tested 190 blood samples, including 21 from individuals known to have vCJD. The blood test was able to detect blood spiked with a dilution of vCJD to within one part per ten billion. Prions, the infectious proteins which cause vCJD and other fatal prion diseases, can inhabit the human body for up to 50 years before presenting symptoms. During this time there is a chance a carrier of vCJD infection could pass on the infection to others through blood transfusion or through surgical and medical instruments. An accurate blood test would enable people to be diagnosed earlier and could also help identify carriers of the disease. This would help measure how widespread the prion infection is in the general population and identify those who are at risk of passing on the infection to others. Commenting on the development, lead author Dr Graham Jackson, programme leader at the MRC Prion Unit, said: “This test comes at the end of many years of meticulous, painstaking research in our Unit and the NHS National Prion Clinic. Although further larger studies are needed to confirm its effectiveness, it is the best hope yet of a successful early diagnostic test for the disease. This test could potentially go on to allow blood services to screen the population for vCJD infection, assess how many people in the UK are silent carriers and prevent onward transmission of the disease.”
