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FEATURING:
Pierluigi Gambetti, MD
(Professor and Director, Division of Neuropathology, CWRU School of Medicine and University Hospitals Cleveland)
Witold Surewicz
(Professor, Department of Chemistry, CWRU )
EVENT TOPIC:
Few diseases have generated as much interest and controversy in recent years as prion diseases, a group of diverse brain-wasting disorders that includes Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and Fatal Familial Insomnia in humans, and ‘mad cow disease’ in cattle. These diseases are transmitted or spontaneously triggered by a novel infectious pathogen, called prion. Unlike conventional pathogens such as viruses or bacteria, prions are devoid of nucleic acids and consist solely of an abnormally shaped (‘misfolded’) version of a naturally occurring prion protein. Prions replicate and spread by binding to the normal prion protein and forcing it to take on the abnormal shape. Since, theoretically the shapes that prions can adopt are infinite, so is the variety of prion diseases. Intriguingly, recent research suggests that prion-like mechanisms may be involved in a host of other human diseases.
EVENT INFORMATION:
WHERE: The Market
Garden Brewery
(Located
at
1947
West
25th Street next to the West Side Market, Cleveland, Ohio)
WHEN: November 14, 2011
Drinks
at
6:30
pm,
discussion starts around 7:00 pm
WHO: Sponsored by Case Western
Reserve University chapter of Sigma Xi, WCPN
ideastream, and the Market
Garden Brewery
click here to download .pdf flyer
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