“Assessing and Reducing Environmental Chronic Wasting Disease Prion Load” by Dr. Mark Zabel, Ph.D.

February 25th, 2026

Dr. Mark Zabel is Professor and Associate Director of the Prion Research Center, Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Pathology in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University. He earned a PhD in Experimental Pathology from the University of Utah School of Medicine, and completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Adriano Aguzzi at the Institute for Neuropathology, University Hospital of Zürich, Switzerland. Dr. Zabel’s research focuses on prion immunology, pathology, diagnostics and therapeutics. His lab developed nonviral delivery platforms using lipid nanoparticles to deliver transcript-suppressing and gene-editing tools to neural cells to decrease prion protein expression that negatively impacts prion replication to prevent terminal prion disease. His most recent work focuses on prion ecology and efforts to mitigate environmental prion contamination.