Prion Decontamination of Surgical Instruments

An alliance to develop commercially viable technology to decontaminate surgical instruments having a risk of prion infection is showing promising results, according to the two participants, Genencor International, Inc. (Palo Alto, CA, USA) and UK's Health Protection Agency (HPA, Porton Down, UK).

The process being developed uses a proprietary thermostable protease enzyme from Genencor to destroy infectious prions seen as the cause of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) and its human form, variant Creutzfelt-Jacob disease (vCJD). Several patents have been filed with claims describing the inactivation and detection of transmissible spongiform encephalopathy (TSE) agents. In the United Kingdom, surgical instruments used in procedures involving patients suspected of CJD are disposed of rather than sterilized and re-used, in order to minimize the risk of exposure to other surgical patients. The new process is expected to offer a safe and cost-effective alternative.

"While the long-term experiments are still ongoing, the preliminary results strongly suggest the efficacy of our process to substantially reduce the risk of infectivity by prions,” said Neil Raven, Ph.D., prion research director at HPA. "Based on these encouraging results, we are now reasonably confident that our process will enable a new solution to prion elimination.”





Related Links:
Genencor
Health Protection Agency