About the Virtual Conference

The CJD Foundation Family Conference is typically held annually in July in Washington, DC. Due to public health restrictions, this year's event will be held virtually again, at no cost.

We will greatly miss this opportunity to gather with the CJD community in person, but look forward to sharing with you updates from the nine research grants we awarded this year, thanks to your generous support.  We at the CJD Foundation send our best wishes, and our hopes that you remain safe and healthy.

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What You'll Learn:

Each year at the CJD Foundation conference, we provide overviews about the basics of prion disease as preparation for the scientific presentations.  Watch recordings of the 2020 presentations on the CJD website.

The 2021 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Report

Ryan Maddox, PhD, Epidemiologist, Prion and Public Health Office Division of High-Consequence Pathogens and Pathology, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

Keynote Address: A Historical Appraisal Of The Field Of Prion Diseases: What We've Learned And Why We Should Be Optimistic

Introduction by: Dr. Pierluigi Gambetti
Brian Appleby, MD, Medical Director, CJD Foundation, and Director, National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center

Diagnosis And Caregiving For CJD Patients

  • Brian Appleby, MD, Director of National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center
     
  • Gregory Day, MD, MSc, Dept. of Neurology, Mayo Clinic
     
  • Michael Geschwind, MD, PhD, Memory and Aging Center, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF)
     
  • Moderator: Prof. Richard Knight, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Neurology, CCBS, University of Edinburgh

National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center Update

  • Brian Appleby, MD, Medical Director, CJD Foundation, and Director, National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center

CJD Grant Research Recipients: Panel 1

  • Inga Zerr, MD, German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases – National Reference Ctr. for Surveillance of Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathies, Germany
    “Implementation of a blood-based biomarker test for sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob in clinical practice”
     
  • Alberto Bizzi, MD, Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Neurologico Carlo Besta, Milan, Italy
    “Early diagnosis of CJD from in vivo MRI using the trajectories of prion lesion propagation”
     
  • Simon Mead, PhD, University College London (UCL) Institute of Prion Diseases
    “Genome-wide association study (GWAS) of age at clinical onset in inherited prion disease (genetic CJD)”
     
  • Moderator: Brian Appleby, MD, Medical Director, CJD Foundation, and Director, National Prion Disease Pathology Surveillance Center

CJD Grant Research Recipients: Panel 2

  • Valerie Sim, MD, FRCPC, Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases, University of Alberta, Canada
    “Strain-specific pathology and spread in prion organotypic slice culture assay infected with different strains of Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease”
     
  • Stephanie Booth, PhD, Public Health Agency of Canada and University of Manitoba
    “Detection and characterization of rare strains of sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease using a suite of novel biological and biochemical tools”
     
  • Moderator: Joel Watts

CJD Grant Research Recipients: Panel 3

  • Emiliano Biasini, PhD, Dulbecco Telethon Laboratory of Prions and Amyloids, Department of Cellular, Computational & Integrative Biology (CIBIO), University of Trento, Italy 
    “Pharmacological Degraders for the Cellular Prion Protein”
     
  • Jason Thomas Duskey, PhD, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy 
    “Optimization of nanoparticle-mediated brain delivery of a tetracationic porphyrin with potent anti-prion activities”
     
  • Holger Wille, PhD, University of Alberta, Centre for Prions and Protein Folding Diseases
    “Evaluating passive immunotherapy in prion-infected transgenic mice expressing human PrP”
     
  • Moderator: Prof. Richard Knight, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Neurology, CCBS, University of Edinburgh

Thank You To Our Partners:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention