Tuesday, 13 October 2009
University of Melbourne
Surgical tools infected with prions can cause CJD, but currently less
than one per cent of tools are treated against them.
Australian researchers have created a solution to deactivate prions,
which are rogue, infectious proteins that cause Creutzfeldt-Jacob
disease (CJD) and can be transmitted via surgical instruments.
Novapharm Research (Australia) Pty Ltd, in collaboration with the
University of Melbourne, has developed solutions which break up and
deactivate the rogue protein molecules of CJD.
The outcome is cost effective, will enable all medical instruments to
be treated against prions, will not disrupt current surgical
procedures and is easily incorporated into current cleaning protocols.
The importance of this is that CJD and other prion diseases have no
known cure and can have a lengthy symptom-free incubation period of
decades.
The human prion is resistant to both heat and chemicals and is
reported to be up to a hundred thousand times more difficult to
deactivate than the animal form of infective agent which causes well
known diseases in cattle, such as mad cow disease, and scrapie in
sheep.
Any error in identifying a CJD-carrier can be fatal and costly - many
hospitals around the world have been forced to destroy millions of
dollars worth of instruments when patients were diagnosed with CJD
some time after undergoing routine eye and neurosurgical procedures.
A further factor limiting decontamination from prions is that existing
cleaning protocols are damaging to medical instruments such as
flexible endoscopes and some instruments used in neurosurgical, dental
and opthalmological procedures.
It is estimated that currently less than one per cent of medical
instruments are treated against prions, with hospital procedures
relying on staff to identify potential carriers.
The treatment process was optimised and performed by a research team
in the Department of Pathology at the University of Melbourne led by
Dr Victoria Lawson. The University of Melbourne is Australia's leading
prion disease research centre.
Novapharm's prion deactivating solutions have been approved by the
Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration and have full CE
certification for distribution in the European Union.
According to Mr Steve Kritzler, a director of Novapharm, there should
be widespread interest from hospitals around the world in a solution
that can deactivate prions on all medical instruments, including
flexible endoscopes.
"This solution fills a gaping hole in current infection control
practices which basically rely on hospital staff identifying 'high
risk patients' of these diseases which don't have obvious symptoms,"
Mr Kritzler said.
"The new instrument reprocessing solutions developed by Novapharm can
also be cost effective for hospitals, GPs, dentists, and vets since
they will work with existing cleaning equipment and are highly
effective as a general pre-cleaner compatible with any surgical or
medical instruments.
"We expect hospitals in the UK to be particularly interested in our
solution since it has been the location for a number of CJD incidents
in the past," Mr Kritzler added.
The commercial formulations will be sold in Australia under trade
names Asepti RAPIDZYME Pr and Asepti AUTOZYME Pr.
The solutions are derived from naturally occurring enzymes which have
been specifically formulated to attack the structure of prions while
maintaining characteristics which allow use as a general pre-cleaner
of surgical and medical instruments.
http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20091310-19987-2.html
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