NIH Presents Investigation Results of BrioHOCl™ Against Prions

Allison Kraus, PhD and Research Fellow at NIH-NIAID Rocky Mountain Laboratories, presents the research results of her grant, to test a novel disinfectant (BrioHOCl™) for its efficacy against prions, at the 2018 annual Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD) Foundation Family Conference in Washington, DC.

NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Rocky Mountain Laboratories
July 13, 2018

Investigation of Prion Inactivation by Reactive Oxygen Species in Vivo
More simply, you can think of this as:  Can prions be stopped by a disinfectant that's naturally produced by the immune system?

Your body contains millions of proteins, and these proteins are essential to keep yourselves healthy and operational. To carry out these functions, they need to be very correctly assembled into specific structures, or their normal structures, and the body has multiple ways to ensure that this takes place. However, these quality control checks on protein-folding can and do fail. When they fail, you can get reorganization of these proteins, or miss-folding of these proteins, in multiple ways. Some become disorganized clumps of proteins, and others go on to form these very highly structured proteins that can go on to be assembled into those rod-like structures.

...I first became interested in this process when we were approached by a company, known as Briotech, to test a novel disinfectant for its activity against prions. Why were we interested in testing a novel disinfectant to begin with?  Well prions are really a robust pathogen, and while this does not pose a risk for casual transmission human to human, as Bob touched on, there really is a need for harsh decontamination protocols in surgical and laboratory settings, and it’s really beneficial, then, to have a less toxic and (less) caustic disinfection such that it doesn’t pose a hazard to the user. So Briotech formulates these (BrioHOCl™) hypochlorous acid solutions and they brought these to us to test them for their efficiency in decontaminating prions.