《Gene-Based Antibody Strategies for Prion Diseases》.pdf

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Cell Biology Volume 2013, Article ID 710406, 6 pages /10.1155/2013/710406 Review Article Gene-Based Antibody Strategies for Prion Diseases Alessio Cardinale1 and Silvia Biocca2 1 IRCCS San Rafaele Pisana, Via di Val Cannuta 247, 00166 Rome, Italy 2 Department of Systems Medicine, University of Rome 鈥淭or Vergata,鈥 Via Montpellier 1, 00133 Rome, Italy Correspondence should be addressed to Alessio Cardinale; alessio.cardinale@sanrafaele.it Received 20 May 2013; Accepted 23 July 2013 Academic Editor: Michael Sierks Copyright 漏 2013 A. Cardinale and S. Biocca. his is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Prion diseases or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) are a group of neurodegenerative and infectious disorders characterized by the conversion of a normal cellular protein PrPC into a pathological abnormally folded form, termed PrPSc . here are neither available therapies nor diagnostic tools for an early identiication of individuals afected by these diseases. New gene- based antibody strategies are emerging as valuable therapeutic tools. Among these, intrabodies are chimeric molecules composed by recombinant antibody fragments fused to intracellular traicking sequences, aimed at inhibiting, in vivo, the function of speciic therapeutic targets. he advantage of intrabodies is that they can be selected against a precise epitope of target proteins, including protein-protein interaction sites and cytotoxic conformers (i.e., oligomeric and ibrillar assemblies). Herein, we address and discuss in vitro and in vivo applications of intrabo