Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to support research to identify a cure for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

The Department commissions research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) and invests over £1.8 billion a year on applied health and care research. The NIHR welcomes funding applications for research into any aspect of human health including Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) and clinical trials for therapeutics. Applications are subject to peer review and judged in open competition, with awards being made on the basis of the importance of the topic to patients and health and care services, value for money, and scientific quality.

Since 2002, the NIHR has made available over £43 million of funding for research to address key evidence gaps on variant CJD including the development of a treatment for variant CJD, a diagnostic test for sub-clinical variant CJD, and decontamination of surgical instruments.

Recognising the devasting impact of CJD on patients and their loved ones as well as the current lack of a treatment, Department officials met with the Director of the Medical Research Council’s Prion Unit in October 2024 to discuss possible clinical trials for a candidate therapeutic, namely prion protein monoclonal antibody therapy, for CJD. The researchers were advised to explore the NIHR Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation programme as a route of funding.