Prion Alliance

Prion Alliance is a U.S.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit focused exclusively on accelerating treatments and cures for human prion disease. Founded by Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel after learning of Vallabh's inherited prion disease mutation, the organization funds, organizes, and promotes research spanning disease biology, therapeutic discovery, and enabling laboratory and computational methods. Its work is tightly linked to the founders' prion research program at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. While Prion Alliance is not a traditional venture-backed biotech company, it is health-related and has helped catalyze development efforts in prion disease, including collaboration that contributed to Ionis Pharmaceuticals' antisense program ION717. The organization also supports patient education and awareness for rare prion disorders such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, fatal familial insomnia, and Gerstmann-Sträussler-Scheinker disease.