August, 2003- Dr. Ilia Baskakov has only been at the MBC a little over a year but already he becoming internationally known. He was invited by Dr. William James at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford to lecture and collaborate on some investigations on bovine spongiform encephalitis or "mad cow disease". Dr. Baskokov is an expert on the conformational changes of the prion protein that produce the disease state. He has developed an in vitro model system that can mimic the conformational changes of the protein found in vivo. Dr. James' laboratory is interested in the variants of infectious form of the prion protein that affect the susceptibility of humans to acquire the bovine disease. Dr. Baskakov's model system allows researchers to screen the effects of genetic variation on possible transmissibility of variants quickly and safely. Previous work had to be done in mice where the disease may take two years to develop. This is both expensive and requires high levels of biosafety. The in vitro system that Dr. Baskakov has developed allows researcher to reduce the number of variants that must eventually be tested in vivo to confirm the affects of the genetic variation. This greatly speeds up the discovery process.

Whenever a scientist travels as far away as the United Kingdom, he tries to meet as many of his colleagues as he can and they in turn invite him to talk. This trip was no exception for Dr. Baskakov. He gave 5 lectures going from south and west of London to as far away as Edinburgh, Scotland in the north. He spoke on two different topics, the first discussed the prion protein in the broader context of protein folding; the other focused on his model system. Lecturing and experiments left little time to sight-see, but Oxford itself is historic and beautiful.

"Conformational Transition of the Prion Protein: Exception or Rule in Protein Folding?": 7/19/03, Department of Pathology, Oxford University, 7/22/03, Department of Biological Sciences, University of Warwick, England and 7/30/03, Institute for Animal Health, Compton, England. "In Vitro Conversion of Recombinant PrP into PrPSc-like Isoform" 7/18,03, MRC Center for Developmental Neurobiology, King's College, London and 8/7/03, Institute for Animal Health, Edinburgh, Scotland.