Claudio Soto

Key facts

• At UTHealth Houston he is listed as Professor in the Department of Neurology, Director of the George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Alzheimer's disease and related brain disorders, and holder of the Huffington Foundation Distinguished Chair in Neurology; his stated research focus, and that of the Soto Lab inside the centre, is the molecular basis of neurodegenerative diseases linked to the misfolding and brain accumulation of proteins, with Alzheimer's and prion related disorders named first.
• PMCA was published from Serono in Geneva in June 2001 by Saborio, Permanne and Soto: a small amount of misfolded prion protein drives repeated cycles that convert a large excess of normal prion protein, with more than 97 percent of the resulting protease resistant protein newly made, and the authors proposed it for finding prion infectivity in tissues and body fluids that no other method could detect.
• The 2005 Cell paper from his Galveston laboratory, first author Joaquin Castilla, showed that prion protein amplified in a test tube caused scrapie in wild type hamsters, which was the main experimental support for the protein only hypothesis of prion transmission.
• He is the senior author of the August 2014 New England Journal of Medicine study that found misfolded prion protein by PMCA in urine from 13 of 14 people with variant CJD and in none of 224 control samples, with co-authors at the Cleveland surveillance centre, Carlo Besta in Milan, Paris and the Edinburgh surveillance unit.
• He is also the senior author of the October 2023 follow-up in sporadic CJD, where 29 of 81 patient urine samples were positive (36 percent sensitivity) and none of 160 controls.
• The same group produced the December 2016 Science Translational Medicine study detecting prions in blood from people with variant CJD, and the earlier 2008 FEBS Letters report of infectious prions in urine of infected animals, which first showed that prions reach urine at all; Rodrigo Morales is a co-author on the 2008 paper.
• Current prion output from his Houston group includes the 2022 comparison of North American and Norwegian chronic wasting disease prions for zoonotic risk, the 2024 PMCA based screens for anti-prion compounds, the 2025 mBio study of prions in pigs challenged with BSE, scrapie and CWD, and a 2026 Science Advances study of cervid prion transmission to nonhuman primates led from Calgary.
• The December 2025 Journal of Infectious Diseases paper from his centre pairs foam swab surface sampling with PMCA to find residual prion contamination in laboratories, detecting prions from brain material diluted a hundred million fold and showing that high prion loads can survive approved inactivation methods; it was used when decommissioning a prion research facility and for routine surveillance.
• In April 2026 he co-authored, with Joel Watts in Toronto, Christina Sigurdson in California and the CJD Foundation, an opinion in Trends in Molecular Medicine arguing that CJD should be classified within the Alzheimer's disease related dementias so that research funding and collaboration flow more readily.
• The NIAID program project P01 AI077774 names him and appears as the funding source on the 2022 CWD paper, the 2023 urine paper, the 2025 laboratory surveillance paper and the 2026 nonhuman primate study, so it is the main grant behind the Houston prion work.
• Amprion Inc. was founded in 2014 by Soto and the molecular pathologist Russell Lebovitz; the company says the two began in 2007 on detection of prions linked to CJD and pivoted in 2010 as the CJD threat declined, towards the same chemistry applied to amyloid beta, alpha-synuclein and tau.
• Amprion's clinical laboratory was established in 2018, received an FDA Breakthrough Device Designation in 2019 for detecting misfolded alpha-synuclein, became CAP accredited and CLIA certified in 2022, and sells the SAAmplify alpha-synuclein test, formerly SYNTap, on cerebrospinal fluid; no prion test appears anywhere on the company site.
• In November 2024 the Michael J. Fox Foundation awarded him the Robert A. Pritzker Prize for Leadership in Parkinson's Research, presented on 16 November 2024 at its Research Roundtable in New York and carrying a 200,000 dollar research grant; both the foundation and his institution credit him with inventing PMCA, which they also call RT-QuIC, as the origin of the alpha-synuclein seed amplification assay.
• A Europe PMC search on his name with a Houston affiliation and prion, Creutzfeldt or PMCA terms returns 113 records across all years and 21 for 2023 to 2026, nine of them on prion disease and the rest on other misfolded proteins using the same amplification chemistry; the count is by name string, not by author identifier, so it is approximate.
• The centre he directs appears under slightly different names in different places: the faculty page calls it the George and Cynthia W Mitchell Center for Alzheimer's disease and Other Brain Related Illnesses, the centre page calls it the George and Cynthia Mitchell Center for Research in Alzheimer's Disease and Related Brain Disorders, and his papers use Mitchell Center for Alzheimer's Disease and Related Brain Disorders; the centre page names only an alpha-synuclein strain production programme and does not mention prion disease at all.

Timeline

1. 1993PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology, University of Chile.
2. 1995Assistant Professor, New York University School of Medicine.
3. 1999Joins Serono International in Geneva as senior scientist and chairman of molecular neurobiology, to 2003.
4. 2001PMCA published in Nature from Serono, Geneva.
5. 2003Becomes director of the Mitchell Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases at UTMB Galveston, to 2008.
6. 2005Cell paper with Castilla: prions generated in vitro cause scrapie in hamsters.
7. 2008FEBS Letters paper reporting infectious prions in urine of infected animals, from Galveston.
8. 2014Amprion Inc. founded with Russell Lebovitz.
9. 2014NEJM paper: prions in the urine of 13 of 14 patients with variant CJD.
10. 2016Science Translational Medicine paper: prions detected in blood in variant CJD.
11. 2019Amprion receives FDA Breakthrough Device Designation for misfolded alpha-synuclein detection.
12. 2022Journal of Infectious Diseases paper comparing zoonotic risk of North American and Norwegian CWD prions.
13. 2023Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology paper: prions in urine in 29 of 81 sporadic CJD patients.
14. 2024Awarded the Robert A. Pritzker Prize for Leadership in Parkinson's Research at the Michael J. Fox Foundation Research Roundtable, New York.
15. 2025Journal of Infectious Diseases paper on a foam swab and PMCA procedure for prion surveillance in laboratories.
16. 2026Trends in Molecular Medicine opinion with Watts, Sigurdson and the CJD Foundation that CJD is an Alzheimer's disease related dementia.
17. 2026Science Advances study of limited cervid prion transmission to nonhuman primates, led from Calgary with Houston co-authors.