A corrections: a prion (the disease agent) is believed to be a self replicating protein fold, so it needs a source protein ("prion protein", aka PrP, one word) to feed the folding.
Now, although the evidence is pretty solid that the fold is the infectious agent, there's a lot of unanswered questions: we can try to make prions in the lab but iiuc no one has made a fiber of PrP in the lab without seeding from an infectious sample that itself was infectious.
Moreover, a lot of related Alzheimer's research has come under intense scrutiny recently[0], so much so that the viral hypothesis of Alzheimer's is now dominant and no longer the "prion-like hypothesis", so, it's possible that the self-propagating protein fold is not the infectious agent for prion disease either.
If it is, then it's likely that turnjng down PrP in the brain will slow or even reverse the disease. The PrP fibers probably can be degraded, if very slowly, and turning off the spigot of source material for the fold will push the equilibrium in the other direction
[0] see marc tessier levigne (current CEO of AI/biotech form Xaira)'s firing?resigning? from stanford due to fraudulent data in his lab
A corrections: a prion (the disease agent) is believed to be a self replicating protein fold, so it needs a source protein ("prion protein", aka PrP, one word) to feed the folding.
Now, although the evidence is pretty solid that the fold is the infectious agent, there's a lot of unanswered questions: we can try to make prions in the lab but iiuc no one has made a fiber of PrP in the lab without seeding from an infectious sample that itself was infectious.
Moreover, a lot of related Alzheimer's research has come under intense scrutiny recently[0], so much so that the viral hypothesis of Alzheimer's is now dominant and no longer the "prion-like hypothesis", so, it's possible that the self-propagating protein fold is not the infectious agent for prion disease either.
If it is, then it's likely that turnjng down PrP in the brain will slow or even reverse the disease. The PrP fibers probably can be degraded, if very slowly, and turning off the spigot of source material for the fold will push the equilibrium in the other direction
[0] see marc tessier levigne (current CEO of AI/biotech form Xaira)'s firing?resigning? from stanford due to fraudulent data in his lab