Extracellular vesicles with diagnostic and therapeutic potential for prion diseases

Prion diseases (PrD) or transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSE) are invariably fatal and pathogenic neurodegenerative disorders caused by the self-propagated misfolding of cellular prion protein (PrPC) to the neurotoxic pathogenic form (PrPTSE) via a yet undefined but profoundly complex mechanism. Despite several decades of research on PrD, the basic understanding of where and how PrPC is transformed to the misfolded, aggregation-prone and pathogenic PrPTSE remains elusive. The primary clinical hallmarks of PrD include vacuolation-associated spongiform changes and PrPTSE accumulation in neural tissue together with astrogliosis. The difficulty in unravelling the disease mechanisms has been related to the rare occurrence and long incubation period (over decades) followed by a very short clinical phase (few months). Additional challenge in unravelling the disease is implicated to the unique nature of the agent, its complexity and strain diversity, resulting in the heterogeneity of the clinical manifestations and potentially diverse disease mechanisms. Recent advances in tissue isolation and processing techniques have identified novel means of intercellular communication through extracellular vesicles (EVs) that contribute to PrPTSE transmission in PrD. This review will comprehensively discuss PrPTSE transmission and neurotoxicity, focusing on the role of EVs in disease progression, biomarker discovery and potential therapeutic agents for the treatment of PrD.