> Even if successful, it will probably have side effects.

> Looking at the list of observed changes in mice this can be anything from destroying the sleep cycle to general memory problems.

Prion diseases guarantee certain death right now though, so the side effects would need to be pretty bad for them to be worse than the disease. Even just delaying death by a few years would be pretty good, since most people die in under a year [0].

(This is somewhat similar to chemotherapy drugs, which also tend to have pretty bad side effects but are still generally accepted as better than the alternative.)

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creutzfeldt%E2%80%93Jakob_dise...