Prusiner won the Nobel Prize for discovering prions, proteins that can accumulate and cause neurogenerative diseases like Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a fatal condition that is characterized by memory loss and behavioral changes. Sound familiar? These are the markers of Alzheimer’s, of course, and Prusiner now believes that prions, because they can assemble into amyloid fibrils, are responsible for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. At the cutting edge of this research is the idea of neuroinflammation as a precursor to Alzheimer’s, appearing long before clinical signs and symptoms.
