Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

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> I have a "I'm sure that means something to somebody" feeling.

Break it down! It's not so bad:

> A composition

A bunch of stuff

> a messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA)

mRNA are cellular instructions on how to make proteins that are read by ribosomes that make those proteins as they read along.

> an open reading frame

This is something that starts with a "start codon" and ends with an "ending codon" and encodes valid instructions to make a protein between.

> encoding a betacoronavirus (BetaCoV) S protein or S protein subunit

The instructions refer to the spike protein of a betacoronavirus, or a fragment thereof, because this is what we want the immune system to pay attention to (and make antibodies to bind to and neutralize).

> in a lipid nanoparticle

The immune system gets pissed off about mRNA floating around, because that's one of the things that happens with active infection. So if you want this to get into cells and tell them to make your protein, you need to encase it so that it mostly escapes immune notice itself.

Why haven’t viruses or bacteria evolved to use a lipid nano particle to evade the immune system? Seems like a big security flaw in our cells?

Don't give them any good ideas

I remember someone coming up with a song to encourage people to wash their hands more thoroughly much earlier in this pandemic.

https://twitter.com/vesselofspirit/status/123748864242514739...

According to the song lyric, "novel coronavirus / has a lipid outer shell". So it seems like some viruses have taken advantage of this.

Yeah I think that's the reason for the 20-30 second wash since it takes time for the soap to break down the fatty layer.

That stupid ebola song came to mind. It's very catchy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGltVAJ4JCk

If you squint you could say that viruses are already doing that. A lipid bilayer is a key component of several kinds of membranes. All of our cells have a lipid bilayers separating the inside from the outside. The corona virus is also built from these same lipids, which is why it's vulnerable to soap.

Anyway, I think the important thing that the other commenter was saying is that mRNA needs to be carefully packaged to be medically useful. You can't inject pure RNA as a vaccine because not only is the mRNA going to be quickly degraded before it gets anywhere but if the immune system sees any RNA floating around by then it kicks itself into a frenzy because free-floating RNA is usually a sign that something nasty is afoot.

Some do: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_envelope

And it's pretty common; the flu viruses have one.

Maybe those lipid particles are too unstable if they are not spiked with various proteins?

Moderna vaccine has to be kept in -70 C. Viruses that can survive for any extended period of time only in -70 C won't find many hosts.

Also maybe the process of creating virus shell can't naturally be done without protein scaffold.

They have. That spike protein is part of their envelope ("nanoparticle").

The envelopes used in an RNA vaccine are generally simpler, because they're working under different constraints than viruses. For example, their envelopes don't need to be easily manufactured in a cell.

But some RNA and DNA vaccines do use viruses as their delivery mechanisms, eg the J&J COVID vaccine.

Because some have. Phages for example.

Doesn't this describe almost ANY vaccine - I think that it's probably bad public policy to allow anyone to patent ALL COVID vaccines - I think that patenting a particular vaccine (a particular mRNA string) should be allowed, but not effective wildcards in the RNA

No. It doesn't describe the viral vector vaccines (J&J/AstraZeneca). It doesn't describe the inactivated virus vaccines. It doesn't include the viral fragment (NovaVax) vaccines. And it wouldn't describe some possible mRNA vaccines because of differences in formulation or differences in targeting.

While this particular Moderna claim would likely affect BioNTech/Pfizer's mRNA vaccine, it's not clear whether it would survive in litigation, too.

As to a "specific string"-- if you could just pad a few codons onto the end and not be violating the patent, that's not too worthwhile.

Technically you wouldn't even have to do that. Just change a few codons to alternative codons, it wouldn't even change the amino acids being produced.

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