Fig. 6.

Future perspective in prion disease research: left increasing sophistication of transgenic models, and increasing access to gene editing methodologies is likely to have a significant role also in prion research. Left centre other species, in particular those which are easy to maintain and to manipulate, such as flies may play a role in models, in particular aiming at functional roles of PrP; increasing use of rat models due to the larger brain size. Centre-right a significant potential of induced pluripotent stem cells can be expected, and right in vitro cell-based and cell-free assays will play an important role in diagnostics, epidemiology, and safety of blood products and drug screening