I remember hearing that prions like mad cow disease are misfolded proteins that manipulate other proteins they come into contact with. If that’s the case why can’t you use another prion to unfold it and restore it to normal?
In: Biology
Because we don’t know how.
Protein folding is fiendishly complex, something we need a supercomputer to understand the basics. We are only scratching the surface when it comes to predicting how a protein will behave based on its folding. It might be possible to create a custom protein that unfolds a prion, but that is far beyond our current technological capabilities. You might as well as “why can’t we make a drug that kills only cancer cells?”
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