from Keiji Uchiyama and Suehiro Sakaguchi writing in Prions: Current Progress in Advanced Research:
Prion diseases, which include Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in animals, are a group of incurable neurodegenerative disorders caused by proteinaceous infectious agents, the so-called prions. No preventative vaccines and therapeutics of prion diseases have been developed. Recent lines of evidence suggest that antibodies against prion protein might be beneficial for both preventing and treating prion disease. In this chapter, we first discuss the possibility that there might be many individuals who are latently infected with vCJD prions in human populations, and then introduce the so far reported immunological approaches for development of prion vaccines and immunotherapy against prion disease, including our recent work.
Further reading: Prions: Current Progress in Advanced Research