Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually relatively simple. Proteins, very roughly speaking, are things that change other things into something we need. You could think of proteins required for breaking down sugar, which do more or less exactly that: they take a molecule of sugar, break a part off of it and hand it to the next protein in the chain. What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generall…
>What makes prions so weird is that they are a protein that has been mismade (misfolded, generally). And science doesn't know how they get misfolded in the first place then they basically go "hey other protein, boop you're like me now, let's burn this mother to the ground" and then you get something similar to the 'corrupted blood incident' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident except you lose your m…
Prions misfold in a way that induces other of the normal version to misfold in the same way and therefore spread.
On the plus side prions kills pretty quickly and so there is unlikely to be much underlying mutation in their form or function.
Protein folding is incredibly complicated but I could imagine enzymes which could snip the prion or another similar protein which induces it to fold back into the preferred state. I doubt we have the science to explicitly design such a thing, but you could expose prion molecules in bacteria and put them under evolutionary pressure and they might eventually develop something that disables/fixes the prion.
You would essentially align survival of the bacteria to disruption of the prion molecule.
This link has an image of the two versions
https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/creutzfeldt-j...