Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
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She was in the terminal stage of disease so hence the approval of the experimental treatment , we don't know the long term effects or why it did not work consistently in other patients.
And as of 2019, the patient is still cancer free: https://emilywhiteheadfoundation.org/news/celebrating-7-year...
Here's the relevant quote:
> The Pennsylvania researchers said they were surprised to find any big drug company interested in their work, because a new batch of T-cells must be created for each patient — a far cry from the familiar commercial strategy of developing products like Viagra or cholesterol medicines, in which millions of people take the same drug.
> But Mr. Hoppenot said Novartis was taking a different path with cancer drugs, looking for treatments that would have a big, unmistakable impact on a small number of patients. Such home-run drugs can be approved more quickly and efficiently, he said, with smaller studies than are needed for drugs with less obvious benefits.
> “The economic model is totally acceptable,” Mr. Hoppenot said.
> But such drugs tend to be extremely expensive. A prime example is the Novartis drug Gleevec, which won rapid approval in 2001 for use against certain types of leukemia and gastrointestinal tumors. It can cost more than $5,000 a month, depending on the dosage.
> Dr. June said that producing engineered T-cells costs about $20,000 per patient — far less than the cost of a bone-marrow transplant. Scaling up the procedure should make it even less expensive, he said, but he added, “Our costs do not include any profit margin, facility depreciation costs or other clinical care costs, and other research costs.”
Specifically, countries that don't have a broken extremely-overinflated-pricing model for health care.
Also there are biohackers who synthesize their own insulin and even COVID-19 vaccines and test it on themselves. Their work may cause them more harm than good, but it's their bodies and they're free to experiment on it however they choose. When somebody has a terminal illness and is facing imminent death the risk calculus is very different where even taking the bargain basement biohacker version of a medication may make sense. (Though obviously this particular treatment is a bit different because it uses a modified HIV virus)
Not sure if it good or bad...
The mRNA cancer vaccine they're developing is for people who already have cancer. It's targeted based on the specific tumour the patient has, and basically primes the immune system to attack the cancer cells. They can't even develop the vaccine until the patient has the cancer it's fighting against.
In fact, the body does this regularly. Cells frequently mutate to divide uncontrollably in the body, but are nearly always suppressed by the immune system. It is only when the tumor somehow manage to bypass the immune system or the immune system is sufficiently weakened that cancers can spread.
Edit: I am not anti-vaxxer, just talking about the movie.
My understanding is there was basically a "hey, we can repurpose our stuff for something really important" moment. Which they did, enabling them to produce a working shot with unbelievable speed. (I read somewhere that sequenced sars-cov2 genome to first vaccine shot was something like 48h for them)
And there'll be mountains of cash poured into mRNA research now, so if cancer treatment is a viable path, there's a reasonable chance of some success here. But it won't be a cure-all. We use "cancer" as if it were a single disease, but it's really a large group of different diseases with "unwanted cell replication" as the common factor.
Until about a year ago, potential treatments took 5-10 years of safety testing before general population use. This stuff takes time for things like antibody-dependent enhancement to be found.
What we do know is those who are obese have bad outcomes to C19. I am not obese, got it a couple months ago, and recovered with just home rest. Now I test positive for the antibodies.
Then there is also the fact that when you don't have a pandemic (or even an epidemic) then it's hard to do a phase 3, because it will take a lot of time for enough people to get infected. Part of the reason the SARS1 vaccine was never finished (have never earned an authorization) is that it was over by the time the phase 3 would (or did) start. The same thing slowed down the ebola vaccine. The candidate was ready but then the outbreak vanished, so there was nowhere to do a phase 3.
That is such a blatant over simplification that it comes right up to the border of trolling, perhaps a bit over that border. It is incorrect on a level that practically defies any potential for a response due both to the impracticality of detailing here just how wrong it is, and the fact that a person who makes that sort of comment is unlikely to respond to anything argument that contradicts such a simplistic view of things.
I'll at least address your reference to ADE by pointing out there might be a theoretical possibility there, things have worked out just fine in other illnesses even when know it can be an issue in-- for example-- measles, and yet a vaccine still knocked that out of general circulation a while ago until falsified research helped spark the anti-vaxxer movement and it gradually crept back in to un-vaccinated pockets of the population. Further, ERD simply does not take 5-10 years to detect.
Congratulations on not being obese, and surviving Covid, but no one is debating the fact that most people don't die from it, so you've missed the mark significantly by using your own experience to justify your simplified view of the situation.
I'm not even sure how "cancer" is really a target -- are they talking about individualized treatments for your specific cancer cells?
An individualized vaccine for cancer has to be created and administered fast, within the course of a specific patient’s cancer treatment.
About 50-100 different sicknesses are being targeted right now (a lot of them in secret), so we can't know the biggest winners yet.
Or more accurately, until Bill Gates invested and retargeted them at vaccines. These investments predated Covid19 and were in 2015 and 2019.
IIRC it only took them about 3 weeks to create the vaccine. To work that fast they had to have had a good base to work from, the infrastructure to do so, knowledge and experience.
Moderna:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=mod...
2016: "To develop a novel platform technologies for antibodies or vaccines to reduce HIV acquisition in developing countries"
2019: "To assess the feasibility of mRNA technology to deliver antibody combinations in selected neonates in low resource settings in order to reduce the impact of neonatal sepsis in this vulnerable population"
BioNTech:
https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=bio...
2020: "To development of a COVID-19 therapeutic approach"
There was also a 2019 investment in BioNTech to develop an HIV vaccine.
Some (girl)friends of mine have taken it at their own cost, of around usd$1000 (in Europe).
"chronic condition" sounds like a guaranteed profit for many years. Curing/preventing disease is a bad business.
If you are the first to come up with a cure for that disease you will make huge profit compare to the rest of the industry. Especially if the cure involves coming up with a vaccine or a personalized treatment. Thats like the sustainable subscription wet dream of software companies.
There is an incentive to sell drugs for chronic conditions. Curing these conditions would cut into the profits for selling drugs for chronic conditions -- I hope it should be hard to misunderstood -- it is just a simple math (lifetime customer for chronic condition vs. a single purchase for the cure).
In practice that hardly works, due to nasty business practices and lobbying.
On the other hand this argument works better for scientific progress. Yes, company selling like insulin shots might not invest into curing diabetes. That does not mean that there is not plenty of researchers looking into that issue, potentially disrupting the market.
I just hate that this gets framed in a way that is just a step from conspiracy theories.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine "It is estimated that HPV vaccines may prevent 70% of cervical cancer, 80% of anal cancer, 60% of vaginal cancer, 40% of vulvar cancer, and show more than 90% efficacy in preventing HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers."
I love how this technology turns a medical challenges into a software problem. Being able to code medicine will open up an affordable way to personalized drugs, instead of the current day "one size fits all" solutions. What a time to be alive!
But in practice: personalized medicine is impossible to tests. We rely upon giving tens of thousands of volunteers medicine ahead-of-time to prove if medicine is safe.
While the technology theoretically exists to make and distribute personalized medicine, the ethics and safety questions of doing so remain unanswered.
Personalized therapies are being used to treat cancer patients right now, and using machine learning to find the right binding site for a particular patient's tumor should present no more ethical questions than giving them NSAIDs.
Imagine "if dna.get_race() == $RACE then kill();"
Or how about some biological ransomware?
The way any of this mRNA stuff works is by throwing instructions into our body to create certain proteins in certain configurations. For COVID19, the vaccine is... as XKCD-put it... a set of blueprints to build a "fake death star" without any weapons activated.
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mRNA further has a "innate safety" mechanism, in that it degenerates. That's why our body uses DNA after all: because DNA does not degenerate, even though RNA is what's actually executing so to speak.
So any mRNA medicine will have to be strictly temporary, and get its job done in a limited timeframe. The COVID19 virus gets around this fact by self-replicating. The instructions that our cells execute are to create a new COVID19 virus. The original "quine", COVID19 (and all viruses) "print themselves" as part of their execution.
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The "vaccine" is a set of blueprints for the COVID19 "spike protein" (and ONLY the spike-protein). Since it is missing all the other parts of COVID19, it cannot self-replicate. Our body then gets trained on recognizing the COVID19 spike protein, and is ready when the real thing attacks our body.
> [DNA] Viruses are far more dangerous in that regard.
Not necessarily. "Corrupt DNA" can be somewhat detected the body as a cancer cell. Our "Natural Killer" cells then kill those cells.
Cancer / corrupted DNA happens all the time in our bodies. Even healthy bodies (!!). The difference between a cancer-patient and us however, is that a cancer-patient is overrun with cancer-cells.
Our bodies naturally kill off cancer under normal circumstances. Figuring out why cancer / corrupted DNA completely takes over the body is a big mystery, especially because our body is so good at fighting off cancer under normal conditions.
But we all know that once an attacker has write-access to the machine code in the cache, all is lost ...
There's no way for mRNA to scan the rest of your DNA sequence to make an if/else determination. mRNA is just gonna execute once its in the body.
> Or how about some biological ransomware?
Yeah, that's called a poison and antidote / antitoxin. You don't need mRNA for that. Poison someone's food, and as they lie dying, you can offer them the antidote in exchange for something.
But define race in a genomic sense. It's a feat that key genomic experts have not yet been able to accomplish. For instance: http://ewanbirney.com/2019/10/race-genetics-and-pseudoscienc...
Is it? mRNA can code for a protein that detects other mRNA in the same cell, which may reflect any genetic characteristic of the host.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/translation-dna-to...
When we say mRNA "executes", that's a cell injesting mRNA, and assembling a protein (polypeptide). For example, the mRNA sequence 'ACU', when 'executed' by a cell, will turn into a Threonine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threonine
Of course there is, genes can be turned on/off using transcription factors. Still, the sequence of vaccines are published and easy enough to sequence and analyze, so I don't think something like this could be mass produced.
(And to be clear, this obviously is a piece I'm missing rather than a hole I'm trying to punch in their work. They're way smarter than me and wouldn't be working on this unless they had a clear idea)
So basically the mRNA tech is a means of delivering protein blueprints for in vivo production using your bodies natural machinery. In the case of COVID-19, this was used to manufacture spike protein, which attracts the body's immune response.
I'm not an expert on the best way to use the tech with cancer, but I could imagine a number of different approaches - targeted inducing of cell death, "painting the target" for chemo drugs, making things like monoclonal (designer) antibodies in-vivo, etc. The silver bullet is that it eliminates all of the complexity of creating and storing advanced biologics outside the body. Now you just deliver a bit of code and your body does it's thing.
Slight error: it adds an amino acid to the chain. The chain itself is/will fold into a protein.
The article does explicitly call it a "cancer vaccine" (direct quote from the researcher) and says "the same principle [as the COVID-19 vaccine] can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumours".
That's more specific than sneaking in with mRNA to get the body to produce something. It definitely sounds like whatever it is, it gets the immune system involved. It seems fair to ask exactly how it does this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pembrolizumab
The promise of mRNA is the potential to prompt the body to produce the therapeutic antibodies itself, rather than produce them externally and injecting regularly.
No, it really isn't more than that. You could send mRNA code into the body that produces a designer antibody that is specific to the cancer a patient has (similar to CAR-T, Keytruda, etc.), or you could design mRNA that specifically causes cancer cells to express antigens that attract the immune system. I'm obviously oversimplifying a pinnacle of human achievement, but on paper it should work that way.
If you can find specific sites, you can design a complimentary piece of RNA code to bind it and allow the drug delivery mechanism to do it's thing. Way fewer side effects versus systemic delivery.
cancer cells have distinctive traits that can be exploited for targeting [1]. A fairly elegant approach is to use a vesicle studded with antibodies to the tumor antigen to get the payload to the bad cells, the mRNA is then endocytosed into the tumor cell, expressed and the protien product adorns the tumor cell. when this is an antigen such one sees with measles there would be a long lasting immune response that would look for any cells with this antigen [i.e. target tumor cells]
As such, it is faster to get from idea to vaccine. Recent history is an example already, but the cycle will be improved dramatically considering the technology is very much still in infancy. It’s also cheaper, to the point that producing ten doses of ten different vaccines may not be more expensive than producing a hundred doses of a single vaccine. This will be helpful against “cancer” which is closer to an unlimited number of different diseases than a single target.
Perhaps the molecules they want the immune system to attack aren't sufficiently mobile, sticking to the tumor instead of diffusing into the entire body?
From what I've picked up in the pandemic the immune system has a dedicated proving ground spots where experimentation is happening, and relies on special cells to transport foe candidates into those proving grounds (just like a programmer would gather problematic input samples in their unit tests). Maybe the tumor bits they want attacked cannot be transported to "lab organ", but fragments created separately, from mRNA injections, could, and once the immune system is producing antibodies against those fragments they will also react with the immobile real tumor bits.
Purely speculative on my part, but maybe it really is something along those lines?
Cancerous mutations happen all the time. Usually, the affected cells either
* repair the damage, * get wrecked by the damage's side effects, * suicide or * get blasted by the immune system because the mutation alters their surface proteins in weird ways.
Tumors form because the cancerous mutations succeed to fly under the radar of the immune system. mRNA therapy can be used to make the immune system target specific surface features of cancer cells, or to do something else in connection with the cancer cells that attracts the immune system's attention.
(Sorry, I'm just trying to learn cell biology on my own.)
Ok. But did anyone expect her to say anything else?
This is obviously a (slightly?) veiled pitch for backers, more funding, and perhaps some regulatory freedom.
It's unfortunate that the media can't resist the temptation to pitch this as news. It's not. It's interesting. There's certainly intrigue at 50k ft. But you don't ask the cow, "What do you think of milk?"
Promise and hope should be tempered with context. We've been to this rodeo before.
https://carterheavyindustries.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/co...
> Many have raised the warning that the current epidemic of COVID-19 is actually the result of an bioweapons attack released in part by individuals in the United States government
Also, a bit about the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bart_Classen
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/can-mrna-based-covid-19- vaccines-cause-prion-disease/
It concludes (regarding the claim) that "mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause prion disease leading to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s dementia. What are prions, and can these vaccines cause prion disease? (Spoiler alert: The answer to the second question is almost certainly no. It’s speculation based on highly implausible biology.)"
Classen is correct in one respect at least: "the current RNA based SARS Cov-2 vaccine has been approved in the US on emergency order without long term safety testing." But I think we all know that and understand why.
As for "anti-vaxers", though I don't count myself as one or probably agree politically with most of them, I'm going withhold complete judgment there - vaccines are obviously effective, but until there are actually epidemiologically valid multi-generational meta-studies with as many confounding factors as as possible removed (probably requiring placebos be given to a percentage of people) I'm not sure we can separate vaccines from other relatively novel environmental or behavioral factors that may lead to certain diseases, esp. developmental/neurological conditions. I now have a bit less knee-jerk anti-anti-vax attitude after sitting at a table with several doctors who admitted they didn't/wouldn't follow all vaccine protocols with their own children - but I know this is certainly not scientific evidence. But I'll certainly be getting the COVID vaccine when I'm eligible...
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/can-mrna-based-covid-19-vac...