Candace Mathiason

Key facts

• Her lab page lists her as Professor of Pathobiology, Associate Department Head for Research in Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology, and director of the university's Infectious Disease Research and Response Network.
• She managed the CSU Retrovirus and Prion Research Lab for about 20 years, returned to study in 2006 and earned a doctorate in prion pathobiology at CSU under Edward Hoover; by January 2015 she was an assistant professor and a CVMBS-Zoetis Early Career Research Award recipient.
• As first author of a 2006 Science paper she showed that saliva and blood from CWD infected deer carried infectious prions, using oral dosing and transfusion into naive deer.
• Her senior author papers on blood detection run from a 2013 PLoS One paper on in vitro detection of prionemia in cervids and hamsters, through a 2015 Journal of Virology study of prions in blood soon after exposure, to a 2020 paper that found seeding activity by RT-QuIC and PMCA in buffy coat cells of deer given low oral doses.
• She and Hoover are inventors on US patent 10359434 B2, In vitro detection of prions in blood, assigned to the Colorado State University Research Foundation, priority October 2014 and granted July 2019; it mixes heparinised blood with recombinant prion protein and thioflavin T, and its worked examples use deer and hamsters.
• In 2020 she received the CJD Foundation Kenneth Wheat Memorial Grant for the project Use of Blood-borne Prion Amplification Assays for the Detection of Human Prion Diseases and Biomarker Assessment; the foundation says early detection could serve as a biomarker for prognosis and for therapeutic trials, and gives no amount.
• Her lab page describes work to quantify the timing and blood cell types of human and cervid prionemia, and states that no practical noninvasive test before death exists for any prion disease.
• An October 2024 PLoS One paper from her group found that running PMCA before RT-QuIC detected CWD seeding in about 55 percent of hamstring muscles from infected deer, compared with about 10 percent for RT-QuIC alone.
• A June 2026 Scientific Reports paper from her group found prions in buffy coat cells of healthy-appearing, naturally infected wild white-tailed deer.
• She co-authored a July 2024 Journal of Biological Chemistry paper, led from Cambridge, reporting that flies expressing human PrP had no apparent transmission barrier to variant CJD, BSE or CWD prions, and a 2026 paper using such flies to detect CWD in deer blood.
• She co-authored the 2021 Prion case report that used modified RT-QuIC on placental tissue in a CJD pregnancy, with Christina Orru and Byron Caughey of Rocky Mountain Laboratories, and the 2024 consortium review Chronic Wasting Disease, State of the Science.

Timeline

1. 2006First author Science paper on infectious prions in saliva and blood of CWD deer.
2. 2013Senior author PLoS One paper on in vitro detection of prionemia in cervids and hamsters.
3. 2014Priority date of the blood prion detection patent with Hoover.
4. 2015CSU profile as assistant professor and early career award recipient.
5. 2019US patent 10359434 B2 granted.
6. 2020CJD Foundation Kenneth Wheat Memorial Grant for blood-borne prion assays in human prion diseases.
7. 2020Cambridge veterinary seminar on detection and characterization of blood-borne prions.
8. 2021Co-author of the CJD in pregnancy placental RT-QuIC case report.
9. 2024Co-author of the human PrP transgenic fly paper on variant CJD, BSE and CWD.
10. 2024Combined PMCA and RT-QuIC muscle paper.
11. 2026Paper on CWD prions in blood of healthy-appearing wild deer.