Is anti-sens prion mRNA a therapy?
Listserve 10.12.96 Could anti-sense oligonucleotides be used to catch prion protein mRNAs? Yes, this is a good therapeutic proposal that could easily be tested in mice. For all I know, the experiment is under way as we speak. Promising results have been published with other diseases. There is no technical problem is producing anti-sense oligonucleotides in quantity. A variation on this is to permanently knock out _one_ copy, more or less, of the prion gene (ie on one chromosome). On the hopeful side, anti-prion mRNA, meaning mRNA complementary to the normally transcribed strand, would be expected to accomplish down-regulation of prion mRNA promoter and lower prion production itself and so abnormal prion. Gene dosage experiments, such as the 7x experiments of Prusiner, suggest that higher prion levels lead to exaggerated susceptibility and more rapid course of disease. Transfection under the control of a friendly promoter might produce a steady flow in situ of the desired oligonucleotid
