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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Are there any curable prion diseases right now? As far as I can tell from googling, CJD does not have any known cure. If there aren't, does it mean we need to come up with a completely new class of treatments?

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Speculatively, in the future we may be able to design proteins that would target the prions and destroy them or refold them into less harmful shapes. To do that we would need to 1. know what protein shape would be required and 2. be able to figure out how to make that shape (what sequence would happen to fold itself into that shape). I would think we would need to advance quite a bit more in protein science before that is feasible.

Just to provide background, what you describe is nowhere close to feasible. Designing novel proteins is computationally intractable. It took evolution billions of years and parallel optimization to figure out how to problem solve with polypeptides. We're not even at the punch card phase.

That is simply not true, we have been making great progress in protein design in the last years. I recommend you take a look at this Nature review by Baker one of the biggest names in the field:

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19946.pdf?origin=ppub

Would quantum computers with more logical qbits help? My layman impression was that this could solve protein folding.

This would be a good use-case for a bitcoin or alt-coin.

Could we tag them with the immune system?

There are no current treatments for Alzheimers that do much of anything. If the problem/cause is more confidently known, at least there is a more narrow target to aim at.

There are no current treatments for Alzheimers that do much of anything.

Well, unless you count physical exercise.

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