Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases - University of Alberta

05/01/2026

As part of April being Parkinson's Awareness Month, CPPFD's Dr. Holger Wille was interviewed by CTV Edmonton about his lab's project to develop a prophylactic vaccine against Parkinson's disease. You can see it here.

4 likes. "New research led to advancements in battle against Parkinson's disease"

07/18/2022

A nice overview of inherited photoreceptor diseases and zebrafish by our colleagues Nicole Noel and Ted Allision

Photoreceptor dysfunctions and degenerative diseases are significant causes of vision loss in patients, with few effective treatments available. Targeted interventions to prevent or reverse photoreceptor-related vision loss are not possible without a thorough understanding of the underlying mechanis...

06/12/2022

Anthony Ness et al paper on PrPC in integumentary glands of deer.

Chronic wasting disease (CWD) is a contagious and fatal transmissible spongiform encephalopathy affecting species of the cervidae family. CWD has an expanding geographic range and complex, poorly u...

06/12/2022

From the Westaway lab--an update on gene drive for deleting prion genes in animals:

Prion diseases are a group of fatal neurodegenerative disorders that includes chronic wasting disease, which affects cervids and is highly transmissible. Given that chronic wasting disease prevalence exceeds 30% in some endemic areas of North America, and that eventual transmission to other mammalia...

02/06/2022

Congrats to the Kar lab on their recent publication on unconjugated PLGA nanoparticles protecting neurons against B-amyloid induced toxicity!

Conversion of β-amyloid (Aβ) peptides from soluble random-coil to aggregated protein enriched with β-sheet-rich intermediates has been suggested to play a role in the degeneration of neurons and development of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. Aggregation of Aβ peptide can be prompted by a var...

01/24/2022

Another paper from our Genome Canada team---neural transcriptomics of CWD-infected white-tailed deer. Congrats to Eóin, Allen and all!

Background The increasing prevalence and expanding geographical range of the chronic wasting disease (CWD) panzootic in cervids is threatening human, animal, environmental and economic health. The pathogenesis of CWD in cervids is, however, not well understood. We used RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) to co...

01/24/2022

More on Tau strains from Sang Gyun in the Westaway lab, and Chae Kim in the Safar group.

Rapid replication in vitro implicates distinct populations of misfolded hippocampal 4R TAU protein in accelerated progression of Alzheimer’s disease.

01/14/2022

The Aiken/McKenzie is looking for a post-doc to work on CWD projects-- genetics, interspecies transmission, environmental contamination/decontamination.

11/22/2021

Congrats to Allen and all for their recent paper in Rejuvenation Research!

Metformin, a commonly used, well-tolerated treatment for type 2 diabetes, is being deployed in clinical trials to ameliorate aging in older non-diabetic humans. Concerningly, some experiments in model organisms have suggested that metformin use at old ages shortens lifespan and is toxic to mitochond...

09/17/2021

Congratulations to Qi and all from the Prion Ctr on this cool paper describing a role for exosomes in AD pathology.

Qi Wu, Leonardo Cortez, Razieh Kamali-Jamil, Valerie Sim, Holger Wille, Satyabrata Kar; Implication of exosomes derived from cholesterol-accumulated astrocytes in Alzheimer's disease pathology. Dis Model Mech 2021; dmm.048929. doi: https://doi.org/10.1242/dmm.048929