"prionins", highly specific markers for noninvasive pre-symptomatic detection of tse diseases, and targets for therapeutic reagents to prevent and control tse diseases in animals and humans

Abstract

Proteins expressed from within the prion protein genes of all animals and humans, “prionins”, against which reagents can be prepared for accurate pre-symptomatic diagnosis, for detecting latent TSE, for detecting TSE contamination of food, blood and blood products and for therapeutic treatment of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cows, Scrapie disease in sheep and Creutzfeldt-Jakob syndrome in humans, are revealed.

What is claimed is:  
     
         1 . Any method for diagnosis or pre-symptomatic diagnosis of a TSE disease in humans and animals that involves detecting the sequence, a part of the sequence or a modified form of the sequence of any of the proteins having the sequence of the group of proteins BSAS, SCRAPAS and CJAS wherein said sequences are sequence SEQ ID NO:l, SEQ ID NO:2 and SEQ ID NO:3 respectively.  
     
     
         2 . Any therapeutic method for preventing, treating or stoping a human or animal TSE disease that targets any of the proteins from the group of proteins of  claim 1 .  
     
     
         3 . Any method for pre-symptomatic diagnosis or therapy of a TSE disease in humans and or animals which uses or targets a protein expressed from within an alternate reading frame of a prion protein gene, and which has structural characteristics resembling, totally or partially, the characteristics of the proteins of claim  1 .