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(回答先: 血液検査による異常プリオン検出に希望―英国企業が発表【農業情報研究所（WAPIC）】 投稿者 シジミ 日時 2004 年 5 月 28 日 20:04:12)
British company close to reliable blood test for human form of BSE
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,1224653,00.html
James Meikle, health correspondent
Wednesday May 26, 2004
The rogue protein linked to the human form of BSE and similar diseases has been detected in a patient's blood for the first time, raising hopes that a reliable test for variant CJD can be developed.
The British company Microsens will announce the news to a conference in Paris today, although it will say that more funding and research is needed before routine screening of blood donations and blood tests for diagnosing the disease become reality.
The patient concerned already had symptoms associated with a form of CJD, but the confidence of researchers has been bolstered by the fact that tests on another patient, a woman suspected of having vCJD, were negative for the abnormal prion protein. Her condition subsequently improved and she is now known not to have had the disease, the company says.
The company is now expanding its research to include more samples.
The search for a blood test, vital on public health grounds, has grown in political importance since the revelation last December that one vCJD victim might have contracted the disease from another via a blood transfusion.
Although people who have received blood transfusions since 1980 have been barred from giving blood for transfusions themselves, research published last week suggested that 3,800 people may be carrying the disease, most of whom will never have had a transfusion.
A blood test would not only help safeguard blood supplies, but would avoid accidental transmission of the disease in tissue and organ transplants as well as in many relatively routine operations.
There are therefore potentially substantial financial rewards for companies which find ways to deliver a check for the disease in both humans and animals long before they show obvious symptoms.
Microsens believes its technology could also be used to test for Alzheimer's disease.
At present, tests on brain material are needed to confirm the diseases after death, although tissues from tonsils of living patients and brain scans can give convincing evidence.
Researchers in Manchester have also suggested variations in rhythms of patients' heartbeats could prove valuable in diagnosing vCJD. They have shown changes in four patients already strongly suspected of having the disease.
Further investigations will not be limited to scientific and practical questions. There is no agreed treatment, let alone cure, for the prion diseases, so there are ethical issues over what information should be given to those with no symptoms who test positive for the disease.
The Microsens technology uses compounds that bind on to rogue prions but not on to their normal form. Microsens claims this enables it to pick up very low concentrations.
It has licensed its methods for post-mortem tests on animal tissues in America and is looking for commercial partners for blood tests on live patients and animals. It has also detected scrapie, a BSE-like disease in sheep, in blood.
Stuart Wilson, the company's chief scientific officer, believes it is "leading the way in the race for a sensitive, easy-to-use blood test for both animals and man". There is, he says, "an obvious need to accelerate the development of a vCJD screening process in blood".
The National Blood Service is developing a test facility in Manchester, expected to be ready early next year, but protocols for validating different technologies have still to be agreed. Tests are still likely to be years away.
There are concerns that the search for a test is taking political attention away from the search for a treatment for vCJD, despite promising reports about one option, pentosan polysulphate, that is infused into the brain.
Government advisers have refused to sanction formal clinical trials of pentosan but some patients' families have obtained legal permission to try it anyway.
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