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Microbiology: Current Research
Volume 2
International Conference on
Emerging Diseases, Outbreaks & Case Studies
&
16
th
Annual Meeting on
March 28-29, 2018 | Orlando, USA
Influenza
C
hronic wasting disease (CWD) is the prion disease in cervids
(mule deer, white-tailed deer, American elk, moose, and
reindeer). It has become an epidemic in North America, and
it has been detected in the Europe (Norway) since 2016. The
widespread CWD and popular hunting and consumption of
cervid meat and other products raise serious public health
concerns, but questions remain on human susceptibility to
CWD prions, especially on the potential difference in zoonotic
potential among the various CWD prion strains. We have been
working to address this critical question for well over a decade.
We used CWD samples from various cervid species to inoculate
transgenic mice expressing human or elk prion protein (PrP).
We found infectious prions in the spleen or brain in a small
fraction of CWD-inoculated transgenic mice expressing human
PrP, indicating that humans are not completely resistant to
CWD prions; this finding has significant ramifications on the
public health impact of CWD prions. The influence of cervid PrP
polymorphisms, theprion straindependenceof CWD-to-human
transmission barrier, and the characterization of experimental
human CWD prions will be discussed.
Speaker Biography
QingzhongKonghascompletedhisPhDfromtheUniversityofMassachusettsatAmherst
and Post-doctoral studies at Yale University. He is currently an Associate Professor of
Pathology, Neurology and Regenerative Medicine. He has published over 50 original
research papers in reputable journals (including
Science Translational Medicine,
JCI, PNAS
and
Cell Reports
) and has been serving as an Editorial Board Member on
seven scientific journals. He has multiple research interests, including public health
risks of animal prions (CWD of cervids and atypical BSE of cattle), animal modeling of
human prion diseases, mechanisms of prion replication and pathogenesis, etiology of
sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD) in humans, normal cellular PrP in the biology
and pathology of multiple brain and peripheral diseases, proteins responsible for the
α
-cleavage of cellular PrP, as well as gene therapy and DNA vaccination.
e:
qxk2@case.eduQingzhong Kong
Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, USA
Zoonotic potential of chronic wasting disease prions from cervids