Rodrigo Morales

Key facts

• Professor of Neurodegenerative Diseases Research, Department of Neurology, McGovern Medical School, UTHealth Houston; joined as postdoc 2009, Assistant Professor 2012, Associate Professor 2018.
• Trained at Universidad de Chile (BSc biochemistry, PhD 2009) with thesis work done at UTMB Galveston.
• Research covers prion strain diversity, species barriers, chronic wasting disease and the prion-like spread of amyloid-beta in Alzheimer disease.
• Second affiliation: researcher at Centro Integrativo de Biologia y Quimica Aplicada (CIBQA), Universidad Bernardo O'Higgins, Santiago, Chile, listed on his recent papers.
• 2022 CJD Foundation grant: Development of a high throughput system for screening anti-prion molecules (UBO lists it as running 03/2022 to 02/2024).
• 2020 CJD Foundation grant on prions in pork from pigs exposed to scrapie, CWD and BSE; the 2025 mBio follow-up found pig BSE prions could misfold human PrP.
• FASEB J 2024 paper adapted PMCA to a higher-throughput format and found strain-specific anti-prion compounds across rodent and deer prions.
• Biomolecules 2024 paper with Claudio Soto's group: of eight compounds, only methylene blue fully blocked prion replication across four species (IC50 about 7.7 micromolar against vCJD prions).
• Co-authored a 2024 PLoS Pathogens review of therapeutic perspectives for prion diseases in humans and animals.
• Co-author of the 2024 CWD State of the Science consortium review with Byron Caughey (RML), Colorado State Prion Research Center and University of Alberta CPPFD authors.
• Recent CWD detection work: PMCA found cervid prions in wild pigs (EID 2025, with Colorado State co-authors) and prions persist in deer nasal bot parasites (2024 to 2025).

Timeline

1. 2009PhD from Universidad de Chile; joined UTHealth Houston as a postdoctoral fellow.
2. 2012Assistant Professor at UTHealth Houston.
3. 2017NIH NIAID R01AI132695 on environmental CWD prions begins.
4. 2018Associate Professor at UTHealth Houston.
5. 2020CJD Foundation grant on zoonotic potential of porcine prions.
6. 2022CJD Foundation grant for high-throughput anti-prion screening begins.
7. 2024FASEB J paper on PMCA adapted for anti-prion compound screening.
8. 2024Biomolecules paper screening anti-prion compounds; methylene blue active across species.
9. 2024PLoS Pathogens review of prion therapeutic perspectives.
10. 2025EID paper on CWD prions in wild pigs.
11. 2025mBio paper on prions in pigs challenged with BSE, scrapie and CWD.
12. 2026eNeuro paper finds TMEM106B loss does not change prion disease course in mice.