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Comment by frisco | Hacker News Reader

Totally. This is called "adoptive cell transfer" and it's one of the hottest areas of biotech at the moment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adoptive_cell_transfer

Wow, sure it's not at "super human" immune system levels yet, but this is the type of research that feels like we're entering SciFi territory.

you type into your glowing device connected nigh-instantaneously to a hefty proportion of the world.

yes, but i’m used to that already :)

So, like an 1840s telegraph, but a bit better and with more spyware?

This cell transfer thing is just like a vaccination, but better. And a 2020 car is just like an 1820 train, but better. And a computer is just a programmable loom, but better.

Haha, I was with you until the computer comparison. A 2020 car can go an order of magnitude faster than a 1820 train. A 2020 computer can go so much faster I can't even estimate how many orders of magnitude with certainty.

Yep, and I remember when I got my first kindle e-ink reader, the first one they made, and was in awe because between that and the first iphone a few months earlier, it reminded me so much of the device described in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age.

I got used to it, and the feeling went away.

I had a similar feeling when I got a bluetooth headset where I just had to tap and speak and Google would answer almost any question I had, no need to even half shout "OKAY GOOGLE" for my phone to hear. I now actually feel dumber without such a headset because I can't easily get answers to random questions.

So, yeah, we get used to these things. The measure of "being in the future" is less the awe we have at technological marvels and more the way they become common place and accepted.

wouldn't a normal vaccine classify as "super human" immune performance?

I take your point, but what's sci-fi is always a receding horizon :)

Always wonder about the data density of this type of information: it’s possible to Store all the virus? It’s LIFO stack? What’s the limit?

In tech terms? It's probably more like a bloom filter, which means eventually it can be a problem if it starts to get too many false positives.

False positives as in it starts attacking healthy/friendly cells? That seems like a pretty big downside.

It is a huge problem. It’s called “autoimmune disease”, and global prevalence is on the rise.

AFAIK the hypothesis is that is a result of modern life being “too clean”, so not enough “unfriendly” variety to train on.

Happens 1 in 100k people every year. It's called Guillain-Barré syndrome [1]. After an infection your immune system gets confused and starts attacking your peripheral nerves.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillain–Barré_syndrome

That's just one of many possible autoimmune diseases.

Yes, of course there are tons of autoimmune diseases (from mild allergies, to lupus, multiple sclerosis, and sympathetic ophthalmia), but Guillain-Barré syndrome is an autoimmune disease that's known to occur after otherwise banal infections or even vaccine shots. That's why I considered it more relevant to the OP than other autoimmune diseases.

I'm not familiar with what T cells do, I thought they did not have a single target, unlike antibodies -- wouldn't transplanting T cells mean they would immediately attack the patients cells, as they are detected as foreign?

T cells have a single target, like antibodies. The target is a peptide, a fragment of a protein 8-11 residues long. That peptide could show up in several target proteins, but usually (?) is unique to one protein.

This is a bit of an oversimplification. Firstly, the peptide is 8-11 residues for cytotoxic, aka killer, T cells which i think is what we're talking about here. It's 13-17 residues for for helper T cells. Secondly, there are varieties of T cells which don't have a single target, like invariant natural killer T cells, but those are pretty obscure, and not what people are talking about when they just say "T cells".

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