2006-07-21
Author: 800 CHAB News / U of S
Two University of Saskatchewan research teams have been awarded nearly $800,000 from PrioNet Canada to help develop vaccines for mad cow and similar diseases and to track the spread of chronic wasting disease (CWD) in deer in the wild.

"Health promotion and disease prevention are key themes in our strategy to become one of Canada's top 10 research-intensive universities," says U of S Vice-President Research Steven Franklin. "Today's support from PrioNet Canada plays to our strengths in wildlife health management and world-leading vaccine development."

The U of S projects are two of 10 across the country announced by PrioNet Scientific Director Neil Cashman today at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. The U of S leads the CWD program within PrioNet.

"Prion diseases have devastating economic, social, environmental, and health consequences. PrioNet is proud to be a part of enabling solutions for prion diseases in Canada," says Cashman, who also leads one of Canada's foremost prion research programs at the UBC.

Prions are infectious proteins which cause similar, naturally occurring proteins in the body to become mis-folded. These mis-folded proteins accumulate in the body, causing diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, or TSEs. These include CWD in deer and elk, BSE (mad cow) in cattle, and Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. A variant of CJD in people has been linked to eating products from cattle infected with mad cow disease.

* Trent Bollinger is an associate professor in the department of veterinary pathology and regional director of the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine at the U of S. His team will receive $500,000, their second PrioNet grant, for their work to better understand how CWD is transmitted in wild deer populations. The team's first grant, for $760,000, was awarded soon after PrioNet's launch in November, 2005.

Using radio collars to track deer movements and state-of-the-art techniques in population genetics, Bollinger's team is determining where deer congregate, how they move within their habitat, and how they come into contact with one another. Knowledge gained will help predict the spread of CWD in the wild, identify risk factors such as population density, and determine if genetics has a role to play in susceptibility to the disease.

* Andrew Potter is a vaccinologist and associate director (research) at the U of S Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO). His team will receive $292,000 to develop vaccine technologies that stimulate antibodies to infectious prions.

Potter and his team will focus on an antibody-binding site that occurs on the surface of prions in a wide variety of mammal species. This makes it an ideal target for potential prevention and treatment of mad cow, CWD, and other prion diseases. The team will use a patented vaccine system proven effective when it's necessary to vaccinate against a naturally occurring protein produced by the host, making it an excellent candidate for use in a prion vaccine.

PrioNet Canada, based at UBC, was launched in November, 2005 as one of Industry Canada's Network of Centres of Excellence. Its mandate is to disseminate a coast-to-coast response to the potential risk of mad cow and other prion diseases in Canada. Its ongoing research aims to enhance human and animal health; train and retain excellent basic and applied scientists; and, derive socioeconomic benefits for all Canadians.