Despite intensive research, most neurodegenerative dis-eases cannot be cured and for some of them no treatment is available to increase survival or quality of life. Among the latter are prion diseases, fatal and transmissible neuro-degenerative diseases of humans and other animals. Exam-ples are Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in man, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE, also known as mad cow disease) in cattle, scrapie in sheep and goats, and chronic wasting disease (CWD) in cervids.