Surgical Tools can be sterilized for Prions (Mad Cow Disease)

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New steriliser to save lives

Tuesday, 13 October 2009

University of Melbourne

 

Surgical tools infected with prions can cause CJD, but currently less

than one per cent of tools are treated against them.

 

Australian researchers have created a solution to deactivate prions,

which are rogue, infectious proteins that cause Creutzfeldt-Jacob

disease (CJD) and can be transmitted via surgical instruments.

 

Novapharm Research (Australia) Pty Ltd, in collaboration with the

University of Melbourne, has developed solutions which break up and

deactivate the rogue protein molecules of CJD.

 

The outcome is cost effective, will enable all medical instruments to

be treated against prions, will not disrupt current surgical

procedures and is easily incorporated into current cleaning protocols.

 

The importance of this is that CJD and other prion diseases have no

known cure and can have a lengthy symptom-free incubation period of

decades.

 

The human prion is resistant to both heat and chemicals and is

reported to be up to a hundred thousand times more difficult to

deactivate than the animal form of infective agent which causes well

known diseases in cattle, such as mad cow disease, and scrapie in

sheep.

 

Any error in identifying a CJD-carrier can be fatal and costly - many

hospitals around the world have been forced to destroy millions of

dollars worth of instruments when patients were diagnosed with CJD

some time after undergoing routine eye and neurosurgical procedures.

 

A further factor limiting decontamination from prions is that existing

cleaning protocols are damaging to medical instruments such as

flexible endoscopes and some instruments used in neurosurgical, dental

and opthalmological procedures.

 

It is estimated that currently less than one per cent of medical

instruments are treated against prions, with hospital procedures

relying on staff to identify potential carriers.

 

The treatment process was optimised and performed by a research team

in the Department of Pathology at the University of Melbourne led by

Dr Victoria Lawson. The University of Melbourne is Australia’s leading

prion disease research centre.

 

Novapharm’s prion deactivating solutions have been approved by the

Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration and have full CE

certification for distribution in the European Union.

 

According to Mr Steve Kritzler, a director of Novapharm, there should

be widespread interest from hospitals around the world in a solution

that can deactivate prions on all medical instruments, including

flexible endoscopes.

 

“This solution fills a gaping hole in current infection control

practices which basically rely on hospital staff identifying ‘high

risk patients’ of these diseases which don’t have obvious symptoms,”

Mr Kritzler said.

 

“The new instrument reprocessing solutions developed by Novapharm can

also be cost effective for hospitals, GPs, dentists, and vets since

they will work with existing cleaning equipment and are highly

effective as a general pre-cleaner compatible with any surgical or

medical instruments.

 

“We expect hospitals in the UK to be particularly interested in our

solution since it has been the location for a number of CJD incidents

in the past,” Mr Kritzler added.

 

The commercial formulations will be sold in Australia under trade

names Asepti RAPIDZYME Pr and Asepti AUTOZYME Pr.

 

The solutions are derived from naturally occurring enzymes which have

been specifically formulated to attack the structure of prions while

maintaining characteristics which allow use as a general pre-cleaner

of surgical and medical instruments.

 

http://www.sciencealert.com.au/news/20091310-19987-2.html