The Schaetzl Lab
Welcome to the Schaetzl (Schätzl) Prion and Immunology Research Group
What do we do?
Our lab studies the molecular and cellular biology of prion diseases with the goal to develop therapeutic and prophylactic anti-prion strategies. Our lab is one of very few labs worldwide that covers the full spectrum of prion research, from in vitro platforms to cell culture and small and large animal models. Our unit can house up to 1,800 prion-infected rodents, has immunohistochemistry, confocal microscopy, single-cell RNASeq and spatial transcriptomics equipment in prion containment labs. We use various transgenic mouse lines for propagating prions of different species, knock-in mice that recapitulate CWD pathogenesis as found in the cervid host (pioneered by the Gilch lab) and have access to an in-house reindeer facility.
Prions are atypical infectious agents that cause strictly fatal neurodegenerative diseases, including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans, scrapie in sheep, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in cervids. Prion diseases are prototypical conformational or protein misfolding disorders, caused by misfolding of the normal cellular prion protein (PrPC) into its infectious and pathologic isoform PrPSc. A lot of our current research studies chronic wasting disease (CWD), a highly contagious prion disease in free-ranging and captive cervids that is on the rise in the U.S. and Canada. There are many negative effects CWD has for cervid populations and certain sectors of Canadian economies. It is therefore crucial to establish strategies that facilitate an effective containment of CWD. Active vaccination would be such an approach but seems hampered by the apparent inability of the immune system to sense and counter-act prion diseases.
Dr. Hermann Schaetzl (Schätzl)
Our group has established a strong research portfolio around CWD vaccine development that is at the international forefront. Ongoing research will define the correlates of protection for our vaccine candidates to develop vaccines that protect the animal population while reducing shedding of CWD prions into the environment. While this has been challenging to address in the past due to the lack of appropriate and affordable animal models, we now have knock-in mouse models that reflect CWD pathogenesis in cervids. We have also entered several collaborative vaccination-CWD challenge trials in deer and elk. The vaccination strategy used here has two significant additive effects. It has the potential to improve individual survival, which will hopefully translate into population effects. It also reduces prion shedding, likely translating into reduction of CWD prions in the environment in the long term.
We are also a founding member of the Canadian German CWD macaque consortium that studies the zoonotic potential of CWD by inoculation into Cynomolgus macaques since 2008. Our laboratory passaged macaque CWD into various rodent hosts, providing the first experimental evidence that CWD can orally infect old-world monkeys, considered a relevant non-human primate model.