3 ms·

While entirely incurable today (like many other diseases), I suspect that reality is not nearly as terrifying as the story that as painted. A virus is after all

While entirely incurable today (like many other diseases), I suspect that reality is not nearly as terrifying as the story that as painted. A virus is after all your own cells used against you, so its modus operandi of having your body fail yiu is not really that unique. Articles make it sound like our entire being unwinds in their presence, while the real outcome is likely much less exciting: clumps slowly forming that fail to get cleared and end up causing problems as they accumulate. Fatal and no available cure once there are symptoms, but... Less scary. (Disclaimer: I, like everyone else in this thread, is not a qualified source of medical information.)

SamBam 5y ago
I agree that it seems at least plausible that a cure will be found in the future. The cell already has a number of quality control mechanisms for detecting misfolded proteins. It seems not unusual that we'd be able to piggyback onto this system do develop something that can detect specific prions and neutralize or destroy them, possibly delivered an an RNA shot. The problem is that there are a minuscule number of prion deaths in the developed world, so I don't see it getting a huge amount of attention. On the other hand, the Covid RNA vaccines were basically invented by a handful of people looking at a string of nucleotides over the course of five days. (It took large companies to actually develop the vaccine itself, of course.) This could end up being something that's solved by more accurate protein-folding simulations (perhaps Google's AlphaFold) and a couple of grad students.