E. Fiona Houston

Key facts

• The University of Edinburgh Research Explorer gives her job title as Senior Research Fellow and Group Leader, with organisational units Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies and Edinburgh Neuroscience; the biography on the same page says she was appointed Group Leader in the Neurobiology Division of the Roslin Institute in 2013.
• Her career path on that profile runs: Edinburgh veterinary degree in 1989, four years in veterinary practice in Canada and the UK, a PhD on the immunopathogenesis of Theileria parva in cattle at the Institute for Animal Health, Compton, then group leader there on sheep transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, the University of Glasgow Veterinary School from 2007 on a Royal Society Relocation fellowship and then as senior lecturer, and Roslin from 2013.
• Her stated research interests are ruminant prion diseases and their zoonotic potential, transmission of prions by blood transfusion in sheep, the use of the archived sheep blood sample set for diagnostic biomarkers, long term subclinical infection as a possible transmission reservoir, and prion protein genetic variation and chronic wasting disease susceptibility in European cervids.
• She is first author of the 2000 Lancet letter reporting transmission of BSE to a sheep by transfusion from a donor with no clinical signs, and of the 2008 Blood paper giving the final results of that experiment: transmission rates of about 36 percent for BSE and 43 percent for scrapie, most transmissions from blood taken after the midpoint of the incubation period, and three of eight BSE infected recipients surviving up to seven years with no clinical signs.
• She is senior author of the November 2023 PLOS One paper from an all Roslin team that added an iron oxide bead capture step to RT-QuIC and detected misfolded prion protein in whole blood of BSE infected sheep up to two years before disease onset, and in human variant CJD brain tissue; funders were BBSRC grants BBS/E/RL/230002C and BBS/E/D/20002173 and NIHR grant PR-R17-0916-23006.
• She is senior author of the blinded October 2024 Blood paper that compared two PMCA versions and RT-QuIC on longitudinal preclinical sheep blood: both PMCA versions reached 100 percent diagnostic sensitivity against 61 percent for RT-QuIC, all three detected infection 26 months before clinical signs, and none gave a false positive. Coauthors are at the Etablissement Francais du Sang in Montpellier, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency at South Mimms, the Animal and Plant Health Agency at New Haw, and the INRAE and ENVT host pathogen interactions unit in Toulouse.
• The Roslin Institute news item of 18 December 2023 on the rapid blood test names her as the Roslin researcher and says the UK Department of Health and Social Care funded the work.
• Europe PMC shows her as last author on six records from 2015 to 2025, all on prions in sheep blood or on subclinical infection, including the 2015 Transfusion paper showing that a prion reduction filter does not completely remove endogenous prion infectivity from sheep blood, the 2021 PLoS Pathogens paper on donor genotype and route of infection, and the 2022 Scientific Reports paper finding that subclinical infection occurs frequently after low dose exposure by transfusion.
• Her March 2025 brief report in the Journal of General Virology reports the other side of that result: no abnormal prion protein was found in archived lymphoid tissue or brain from sheep that survived oral BSE challenge, which the authors read as oral exposure being far less efficient than intravenous exposure at establishing subclinical infection. Funders were Defra grant SE1844 and BBSRC grant BBS/E/RL/230002C.
• She is a coauthor of the 2018 Vox Sanguinis review on Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and blood transfusion safety, with authors from the Australian, English and United States blood services.
• She is named coordinator of ERA BSE (reference ANR-25-EUPA-0006) under the EUPAHW 2024 call on the French funding agency record, with the University of Edinburgh as coordinating partner alongside the Friedrich-Loeffler Institut, the VIM molecular virology and immunology unit, the Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Institut Pasteur; duration 36 months and the French share of funding 299,805 euro.
• The ERA BSE abstract states that surveillance still finds occasional classical BSE cases, including animals born after the strictest feed bans, that classical BSE may be hidden in small amounts inside atypical scrapie and atypical BSE isolates, and that the work covers genetic persistence factors, hidden classical BSE in atypical isolates and environmental contamination and decontamination. It calls classical BSE the only zoonotic prion disease identified to date.
• The Roslin Institute announced the programme on 25 August 2026 as 1.25 million euro from the European Partnership on Animal Health and Welfare, led by her, with the Friedrich-Loeffler Institute, INRAE, the Pasteur Institute and APHA, to trace the origins of BSE cases born after the feed ban, adapt PMCA and RT-QuIC to tell prion strains apart, and detect BSE in soil and on farm surfaces.
• The funder, EUPAHW, is a Horizon Europe partnership coordinated by Universiteit Gent that runs 1 January 2024 to 31 December 2030, with a total cost of 114,467,317.52 euro and an EU contribution of 57,233,657.90 euro, covering 56 research organisations and 30 funding organisations across 24 European countries.
• The BBSRC institute programme funding both blood assay papers, BBS/E/RL/230002C on pathogen diversity and host adaptation, runs March 2023 to March 2028 with 3,398,478 GBP and lists Andrea Doeschl-Wilson as principal investigator and an Eleanor Houston among 24 co-investigators.
• UKRI lists an earlier Roslin led award, BBS/E/A/00001658 on TSE infectivity in sheep blood and lymphoid tissues, PrP genotype and disease pathogenesis, with Eleanor Fiona Houston as principal investigator, running March 2007 to March 2010 for 33,871 GBP.
• She is a middle author of the 2012 Journal of General Virology paper showing that sheep of the same susceptible genotype given BSE orally had significantly different incubation times depending on the amino acid at PRNP codon 141.

Timeline

1. 1989Graduates in veterinary medicine from the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, University of Edinburgh.
2. 2000Lancet letter reports transmission of BSE to a sheep by blood transfusion from a donor with no clinical signs.
3. 2002Journal of General Virology paper on transmission of prion diseases by blood transfusion in sheep.
4. 2007Moves to the University of Glasgow Veterinary School on a Royal Society Relocation fellowship.
5. 2007UKRI award BBS/E/A/00001658 on TSE infectivity in sheep blood starts at Roslin with her as principal investigator, ending March 2010.
6. 2008Blood paper reports final transmission rates of about 36 percent for BSE and 43 percent for scrapie by transfusion in sheep.
7. 2012PRNP codon 141 paper on BSE incubation time in sheep published.
8. 2013Appointed Group Leader in the Neurobiology Division of the Roslin Institute.
9. 2015Transfusion paper shows a prion reduction filter does not completely remove endogenous prion infectivity from sheep blood.
10. 2018Vox Sanguinis review on CJD and blood transfusion safety published with blood service coauthors.
11. 2021PLoS Pathogens paper on donor genotype and route of infection in preclinical transfusion transmission.
12. 2022Scientific Reports paper finds subclinical infection is frequent after low dose transfusion exposure.
13. 2023BBSRC institute programme BBS/E/RL/230002C starts, funding the blood assay work to March 2028.
14. 2023PLOS One paper on whole blood RT-QuIC in BSE infected sheep published with her as senior author.
15. 2023Roslin Institute news item on the rapid blood test names her and the Department of Health and Social Care funding.
16. 2024Blood paper comparing three preclinical blood assays published with her as senior author.
17. 2025Journal of General Virology brief report finds no subclinical infection after oral BSE challenge in sheep.
18. 2026The Roslin Institute announces the 1.25 million euro EUPAHW funded BSE origins programme she leads.