Stanley B. Prusiner

Key facts

• The IND profile titles him Founding Director of the Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases and Professor of Neurology and Biochemistry at UCSF, on the faculty since 1974.
• The IND leadership page lists him as Founding Director and Principal Investigator, with Jason Gestwicki as Interim Director.
• UCSF announced he would step down as IND director effective 30 June 2026 after nearly three decades, stay on as full faculty with an active research programme aimed mainly at Parkinson disease therapies, with Gestwicki as interim director from 1 July 2026 during a national search.
• His stated research goal is therapeutics that reduce the specific prions behind CJD, Alzheimer, Parkinson, ALS, FTD, CTE and MSA; he received the Nobel Prize in 1997 and the National Medal of Science in 2009.
• His long NIA program project P01AG002132 ran from January 1981 to March 2025, and earlier prion therapy awards (Novel Therapeutics for Prion Diseases, Preventing Human Prion Diseases) ended in 2015 and 2011; no award running past March 2025 is listed.
• Publications from 2024 to 2026 are structural and model studies of alpha-synuclein and tau: a September 2026 bioRxiv preprint on infectious low-twist alpha-synuclein filaments in Lewy bodies, an MSA filament structure in FEBS Letters (November 2024), tau prion transgenic rats in Acta Neuropathologica (August 2024) and Down syndrome tau filaments (June 2024).
• He co-authored an October 2024 JAMA Neurology opinion with Carlo Condello and David Westaway, all with IND affiliation, arguing for extending the prion paradigm to Alzheimer and Parkinson disease.
• He co-authored the UCSF quinacrine trial in sporadic CJD (Neurology, 2013) led by Michael Geschwind with the Memory and Aging Center, which found no survival benefit, and a 2015 Annals of Neurology study with Geschwind on the A224V variant and CJD prion propagation.
• He was senior author of a 2012 mouse study in which intracerebral PrP antisense oligonucleotides prolonged prion incubation by about two months, an early precursor of the PrP lowering approach.
• His laboratory developed 2-aminothiazole and aryl amide antiprion compounds, reported drug resistant prions in 2013, and published on transgenic mouse models of heritable PrP prion diseases in 2016.
• His most recent long public interview (JCI, July 2024) is a career retrospective with no statements on trials, regulation, funding or testing access.

Timeline

1. 1974Joins the UCSF faculty.
2. 1981NIA program project P01AG002132 begins.
3. 1997Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of prions.
4. 1998Founds the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases.
5. 2012PrP antisense oligonucleotide study in prion infected mice.
6. 2013Quinacrine trial in sporadic CJD published with Geschwind, no survival benefit.
7. 2015A224V CJD prion propagation study with Geschwind.
8. 2016Paper on transgenic mouse models of heritable PrP prion diseases.
9. 2024JCI Conversations with Giants in Medicine interview published.
10. 2024JAMA Neurology opinion on expanding the prion paradigm.
11. 2025P01AG002132 ends.
12. 2026Steps down as IND director.
13. 2026Gestwicki becomes interim director; Prusiner retitled Founding Director.
14. 2026bioRxiv preprint on infectious low-twist alpha-synuclein filaments in Lewy bodies.