PRIORITY, FP7 project 'Protecting the food chain from prions' (grant 222887)

PRIORITY was a five-year European Union research project (October 2009 to September 2014) that brought 21 institutions and small companies together to study how prions enter the food chain and what Europe should do about them. It was coordinated from the University of Santiago de Compostela, cost about 7.9 million euro in total and drew about 6.0 million euro from the EU. Work ran in four blocks: prion structure and toxicity, detection, transmission, and epidemiology. It closed with a 2016 consortium position paper that urged keeping the ruminant feed ban and expanding surveillance of atypical prion diseases. It started the same year the earlier NeuroPrion network of excellence ended, and continued the EU line of food-chain prion research. Information only, not medical advice.

Key facts

  • CORDIS records grant 222887 as a large-scale integrating project (CP-IP) in the FP7 food, agriculture and biotechnology theme, call FP7-KBBE-2007-2A, topic on protecting animal and human health from prions in food, feed and the environment.
  • The project ran from 1 October 2009 to 30 September 2014. Total cost was 7,904,904.60 euro and the EU contribution 5,999,499 euro.
  • The coordinator was Universidad de Santiago de Compostela (EU share 564,126 euro), joined by 20 other participants in Switzerland, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Israel, Sweden, the UK, Slovakia, Italy and Norway.
  • Participants included Zurich, Duesseldorf, Institut Pasteur, the Netherlands Cancer Institute, INIA, the Friedrich-Loeffler-Institut, Hebrew University, Karolinska, Edinburgh, Goettingen, Barcelona, INRAE, FERA, the Norwegian Veterinary Institute, Bratislava, SISSA Trieste, Maastricht and Hohenheim, plus two companies, SMP GmbH and Prionics AG.
  • The stated aim was to answer seven questions, among them preventing prions in livestock, decontamination, human infection risk by strain, eradication, a preclinical blood test, identifying secondary transmission and the origin of atypical CJD.
  • Jesus R. Requena coordinated the project and was first author of the closing position paper, Prion 10(3):165-181, published 3 May 2016.
  • The position paper has 36 authors, and says the project produced more than 100 scientific papers.
  • Reported results include a low-resolution model of the scrapie prion fibril, an amplification-based blood test that detected prions in preclinical sheep and in human samples, and amplification methods for milk, wastewater and blood.
  • The consortium reported that infectivity persisted in wastewater longer than a standard protein marker suggested, and tested a microwave method to treat animal by-products.
  • The position paper concludes that atypical L-type BSE has clear zoonotic potential in experimental models, that atypical scrapie can cross species barriers but its public health impact needs more epidemiology, and that atypical cases now outnumber classical ones in many member states.
  • It states chronic wasting disease had not been detected in Europe and recommends a targeted surveillance programme, while saying amplification tests for blood and CSF were not yet robust for routine laboratory use.
  • It names the ban on feeding ruminant protein to ruminants as essential and warns against relaxing science-based policy for short-term economic reasons.

Timeline

  1. 2009Project start, grant 222887.
  2. 2014Project end.
  3. 2016CORDIS Results in Brief article updated.
  4. 2016Consortium position paper published in Prion 10(3).

Last checked 1 November 2026

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