What can mRNA treat next?
qz.com
qz.com
> helping cells produce tissue to heal from events such as cardiac arrest
> beyond simple vaccines [...] mRNA therapeutics might be tailored to instruct a person’s immune system to fight their specific type of cancer, or target protein deficiencies in specific organs, and without the toxic side effects of traditional medications.
> “My personal moonshot is snake venom, and antivenoms for snake bites,” he says. [...] “You inject it into a person, and within hours the protein that you wish is being expressed,” he explains. The final product of such research, he imagines, would be an antidote that could work for the most lethal species of a specific area, delivered in a way that can be preserved for long times in very remote areas—for instance, a powder that can be stored for long periods of time and reconstituted quickly.
This is literally all the info I found that is actually relevant to the interesting headline. The rest of the article is about this person's career and what funding vaccine companies got in 2020.
There’s a massive amount of research about mRNA. Gene therapy, vaccines, lots more. And there was money already sunk in to have mRNA vaccines at a proof of concept stage before the pandemic. There just never was the urgency to use mRNA in a vaccine until the last 15 months.
But mRNA research is all over the place, and not just in vaccines.
Source: my life scientist partner
Edit: Google search for RNA institute turns up lots of results at universities all over the place: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=institute%20for%20rna%...
Rossi was instead interested in using mRNA technology to treat rare genetic diseases which couldn’t be cured by other means.
And I'm not done reading. I just know something about genetic disorders and the stuff about proteins hinted at this possiblity in my mind.
> mRNA vaccines [...] generate a much stronger immune response than responses that are generated to the protein in a normal flu vaccine [...]
> One limitation of the current flu vaccines is that they take about six months to develop, meaning scientists must choose which strains they think will be prevalent in the next flu season — even before the current one is over. So by the time the vaccines are ready for distribution, a different strain may have emerged as the better target.
> An mRNA flu vaccine, on the other hand, can be developed in about a month or so, giving researchers much more time to determine which strains to protect against.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2021/04/11/mrna-flu-sh...
The flu vaccine seems to me to have a better chance of working than an HIV vaccine because we have been trying for decades to come up with one for HIV, without any success at all. I'm not saying that their attempts won't work either, but it's more of a bet than a flu vaccine. An iterative improvement on the existing flu vaccines would still be very helpful.
I have never understood this. How many strains are there? I thought there were only like 4 or so. Why don't they just do them all every year?
Turns out the answer can be found here:
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/viruses/types.htm
"There are four types of influenza viruses: A, B, C and D. Human influenza A and B viruses cause seasonal epidemics of disease (known as the flu season) almost every winter in the United States. Influenza A viruses are the only influenza viruses known to cause flu pandemics, i.e., global epidemics of flu disease. A pandemic can occur when a new and very different influenza A virus emerges that both infects people and has the ability to spread efficiently between people. Influenza type C infections generally cause mild illness and are not thought to cause human flu epidemics. Influenza D viruses primarily affect cattle and are not known to infect or cause illness in people."
"Influenza A viruses are divided into subtypes based on two proteins on the surface of the virus: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). There are 18 different hemagglutinin subtypes and 11 different neuraminidase subtypes (H1 through H18 and N1 through N11, respectively). While there are potentially 198 different influenza A subtype combinations, only 131 subtypes have been detected in nature. Current subtypes of influenza A viruses that routinely circulate in people include: A(H1N1) and A(H3N2). Influenza A subtypes can be further broken down into different genetic “clades” and “sub-clades.” See the “Influenza Viruses” graphic below for a visual depiction of these classifications."
So the answer is: 198 possible strains, 131 that actually occur. That explains why they have to pick and choose.
It does raise the question of why they couldn’t just put a bit of all 131 subtypes in the vaccine. Or if that’d overload the immune system, say, the X subtypes most likely to makeup say 99% of probable flu season strains.
We’ve had people even recently refusing to give their kids polio, tetanus, or measles vaccines - and even 5 minutes of honest research or questions to a doctor will make quite clear how bad an idea THAT is. Getting 100+ flu vaccines, all which would have to go through a pipeline taking nearly a decade, when ‘nothing bad has happened’ on that topic for a hundred years?
Ain’t nobody going to pay for that.
We’ll see how the calculus is different soon. I for one would rather my tax dollars go towards figuring something like never having the flu again than blowing up some random middle eastern country a couple more times.
$20 (likely current retail cost of a flu shot) x the 46 million older adults in the US is a hair less than a billion a year. Making 131 or so effective flu vaccines and getting them through the process with the prior known and effective process? (including all the failed attempts)
Hopefully we’d get some economies of scale, estimates [https://www.passporthealthusa.com/2018/02/how-much-does-it-c...] I found had it between 500m to 2.5billion and a decade each. So 65billion to 327billion.
So between 65 to 327 years for positive ROI if that was your metric.
If you’re talking public good, it would be immeasurable for us and the world though, no question, and on the high end that’s less than a third [https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-473918...] of what we’ve spent in Afghanistan alone.
We'd need try to find out, which I personally think would be way better for everyone involved than many other things we spend money on. So take that as my vote for trying?
It's not that hard to make a new vaccine, the process for flu is very accelerated because they're just a variation on the original theme which has been proven to be safe (though unclear on effective until AFTER the flu season hits). If you think about it, we make a new flu vaccine every year, and develop it in 6 months. Each one contains a few guesses as to which of the flus are going to be an issue, it's not just one antigen in the vaccine. Those guesses are just that, an informed prediction, which is why the vaccines tend to be fairly ineffective (40-60%) at preventing disease altogether, though perhaps better at preventing serious disease.
Moderna is claiming to be quicker, so they'd have a more accurate read on what the REAL flu strain this year is going to be, and so it should be more efficacious. The key variable will be dosing. mRNA vaccines can only deliver a certain amount of mRNA so it might be impractical to deliver very many antigens at once. Also delivery issues, the current flu vaccine is super easy to make and deliver to patients, mRNA vaccines with their complicated cold chains aren't. Obviously it's not an impossible problem, but it's less convenient.
Time will tell, it's certainly very promising!
Helpful: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3619640/
https://www.who.int/influenza/vaccines/virus/recommendations...
What typically happens with HIV is that the body kills most of it initially, but the remaining ones keep rapidly evolving until an iteration evades your immune response, this takes about 12 years. Seems like an mRNA vaccine could be done every 3 years for individuals and either completely eradicate the HIV presence in the body or do it once every 12 years for a reset
Let me know if I fundamentally misunderstand something
What is the big driver of HIV is in the name, it's a Immunodeficiency virus - it kills CD4+ T cells and other cells of the immune system. At a certain point you don't have enough CD4+ T cells left and you lose your adaptive/cell-mediated immune system and then you're in big trouble. Essentially it's a war of attrition and unless you're part of some tiny proportion of people who have either a form of immunity against it or an immune system that for whatever reason is able to continue waging war on it then you will succumb
We have two examples of safe (so far), effective and mass produced mrna vaccines; so it's probably easier to get funding to research and test other targets. HIV is a popular target, although it's also very difficult.
To make up an unrelated tech example of that, my impression was this would be like picking a Blackberry phone, while all your friends have Windows phones. You weren't forced to pick a Blackberry by vendor lock-in, but you may miss out on being in some social circles. Changing that group dynamic would require everyone to switch, not just on a case-by-case basis. But in this example though, the Window's phones (aka vaccination) have strictly more features than the Blackberry (aka kills you less often), so if you can afford to (aka you have an average immune system), it would be more logical to get a new phone yourself and join the network, than to ask all of your friends to get new phones.
But in general, being exposed to (say) seasonal flu every year might not help you at all when a new strain of pandemic flu shows up. The 1918 flu tore through young healthy people.
The delivery mechanism for the mRNA appears to be the primary innovation and I wonder if it would be possible to target it at specific cells. In the cancer context if you could differentially target the mRNA delivery to cancerous tissue, the 'payload' could be more generally cytotoxic but only affect tissue proximate to cancer cells.
This seems like it's on the order of CRISPR for potential to change the landscape of medicine in the next 50 years.
For the incredibly small amount that I know, it looks like a game changer. (Like everything else, though, there's a long road from theory to practice. Implementation is going be very tough)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03072-8
If this immunotherapy gets developed further, the next generations of humanity may look at cancer in the same way that we look upon bacterial diseases: unpleasant, the threat of treatment resistance is there, but not the fearsome serial killer that they used to be.
in such 3world country, misuse/overuse of antibiotic are make for development of resistant. then poor sanatation are make for it easy for to spread to other persons. https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/5/1/99-0103_article
"Developing Nations" or "Developing World" is better.
"Third world" contributes to exactly the kinds of stereotypes that this comment reinforces — the backwardness of poor countries, where doctors don't know better, science is ignored, etc. It's just not accurate; medical knowledge and competence is on the rise all over the world, among both professionals and volunteers.
i have not in previous heard it "offensive" and am not changing because some person sayes it. i have been to many nation, those i call "third world" are backward. improvement you describe make them moving away from third world, not make term wrong, this is move to second then to first. i will not call different word because somebody say so.
Those treatment resistances are quite different. Resistant bacteria spread to other people, while cancer is almost always limited to a single patient. So it the treatment works for a certain fraction of cancers, it'll stay at that level, unlike bacteria which become increasingly resistant over time.
(I guess that in the very long term that might not be true, since natural cancer resistance will offer less of an evolutionary advantage. But that assumes that humanity will remain in a similar state as currently, which seems unlikely.)
Cancers are very patient-specific, and the main threat with immunotherapy is that the targeted cancer adapts quickly enough to escape the immune system again.
(I'm just an interested party and don't have any formal training on the subject.) I'm sure there are technical terms for it, but from what I've read the lack of regulatory features in the replication process of cancer cells tends to accumulate more mutations and genetic damage through each generation. PARP-inhibitors, for example, help fight cancer by suppressing DNA repair enzymes and letting the cancer cells get into non-viable states more often than healthy tissue.
In general though, this genetic entropy/volatility creates a scenario where adaptations can happen quite quickly.
It’s the packaging in lipid particles that is much more interesting. We can get away with this approach for vaccines because we (largely) don’t care where we deliver the payload to, just as long as we get mRNA to a cell where it can make the protein. Not sure about current formulation, but I read most LNPs end up in the liver from circulation.
The next level of tech is targeting the particles, and then it gets as tricky as other contemporary techs, because you want your targeting mechanism on the prticles to be something resembling a receptor ligand (protein/carbohydrate).
Manufacturing of those (and putting them on a lipid particle) is still a slog. If we figure out nice ways to do that (without reasonable purity) then it doesn’t matter what is in the LNP (e.g put gold particles inside cancer targeting particles and zap your cancer cells dead).
At least then if something goes wrong, you could still be put on immunosupressants
In general there are a number of 'targeted' therapies being developed that don't specifically target the cancer cell, but try to make life more difficult for the cancer by broadly impacting a cell's ability to hide, replicate and accumulate...features that the rest of a healthy human tissue is less dependent upon.
So, that's great for vaccine production. Not so great for other diseases. Cystic fibrosis, for example, the body fails to make one specific protein. We (probably) can't just program it to produce that protein, because it would also train the immune system to target that protein. The best non-vaccine targets are probably cancer, where you want to get the immune system revved up against a tumor.
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-hiv-vaccine-could-be-mod...
https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
I am not a scientist but my understanding is that the immune system targets only what it is trained against. It doesn't target anything which is non-self without being trained beforehand.
IMO if it was otherwise there would be no need for vaccine.
So I think that it is quite feasible to make a cell to produce a new protein, for example Zolgensma [0] works that way: It creates a new gene (hence a new protein) to replace a deficient one.
Lymphocytes, or T cells & B cells, are immune cells which have receptors on their surface that recognize a specific, tiny chunk of protein. For any given lymphocyte, the type of receptor on its surface is fixed for its life and that receptor is able to recognize exactly one distinct protein chunk.
Through some very cool mechanisms, very early on in life we all develop a massive number of lymphocytes, each of which recognize different protein chunks. I've not read any research which quantifies the scope here, but it's not unreasonable for the sake of a thought exercise to the assume that at one point we all have a lymphocyte receptor repertoire that's capable of recognizing every conceivable natural protein. Through what I consider one of my top 10 most jaw-dropping biological mechanisms [0], we cull the population of lymphocytes that recognize self, leaving us with a cell population capable of recognizing and responding to every non-self protein conceivable. No training is needed here, each of us at this exact moment has several T cell and B cell populations ready to recognize proteins produced by the next novel pandemic causing virus, whatever future protein mRNA vaccines might make, and whatever proteins these future mRNA therapies might produce.
What you refer to as training is probably more like immunological memory, which allows for a ramping up of the immune response on a quicker timeline. We give vaccines where it's generally not safe (or survivable) to wait out an effective immune response, because the disease causes so much havoc in the meantime. This doesn't really apply for the introduction of novel, useful proteins.
Your point about Onasemnogene abeparvovec is a very interesting one. I'm truly only guessing here, but people with SMA almost universally produce functional protein via SMN2, but very little of it. It's not enough to serve its function, but is perhaps enough for effective self-tolerance. I'm also not entirely sure about the timeline of self-tolerance development, it's possible Onasemnogene abeparvovec is given young enough to allow effective tolerance development!
Kinda. Programming but more like a browser JS.
You're not changing anything (your DNA) and whatever you're making is temporary and limited (especially because you can't have anything too complex or long as mRNA without that breaking up).
Anyway, AFAIK the mRNA breakthrough wasn't with the mRNA itself, but rather the delivery vehicle to avoid said immune response. I don't think your example of cystic fibrosis, and generally chronic illnesses, are prime targets for mRNA based therapy, as the genetic defect isn't causally targeted by mRNA tech. You would force all cells (with non-discriminatory vehicles) to produce the missing protein repeatedly. Much better target for gene therapy.
I don't think people see the future of mRNA in substituting into the delicate machinery of the cell continuously. I think the possible therapy target are of the type raw, simple one-hit wonders. Very much alike traditional medication approaches, with the twist of excellent drug delivery avoiding extracellular pharmacokinetics, e.g. vitamin C has very different, even antagonistic roles in the intra- vs extracellular space, and of course liver-fistpass and immunological clearance. mRNA tech is not gene therapy (although, there is of course effective overlap).
I have Ulcerative Colitis, which is a form of an autoimmune disease. A vaccine as a cure would be a game changer.
Not questioning, just willing to learn.
They have good disease induction in their control groups, their targeted mRNA therapy shows pretty remarkable efficacy, and they show they can diversify a little bit with respect to the target.
These models are a little too "furry test tube" for me for this application. They work by injecting an antigen, either a short version of the myelin oligodendrocyte glycoprotein (MOG) peptide or the myelin proteolipid protein (PLP). The mouse makes antibodies against that antigen, and those antibodies also attack those antigens in their natural environments, leading to demyelination in the CNS. Well their mRNA for the MOG model makes more MOG peptide, giving the antibodies another target so they don't cause demyelination. In the human condition, there are multiple antibodies against multiple targets, so I'm not sure this is as relevant as they're suggesting, unless I'm missing something. I do want to add that this paper has a ton of work in it, and it looks pretty high quality as far as I can tell.
None of this is to say there's no value here, I'm just not sure what target they would make an mRNA for to treat human MS based on this paper or how they'd identify and test that target to get FDA approval to move into trials.
They do bring up the multiple target problem. The glint of hope for that involves "bystander suppression", which they found some evidence for happening, but I don't really understand what that is.
I think I don't understand it very well, but it seems one approach is to have the vaccine cause cells involved in an auto immune disorder to put a bunch of 'friend' markers on their surface. So the technology is that they can trigger protein expression and the medical approach is to get cells to express proteins that lessen immune activity against the cell.
If it really does turn out that effective mRNA vaccines can be created in a straightforward way for a host of new diseases, that's ten years of deaths and misery that we as a society just allowed to happen unnecessarily. I don't know how to fix that: maybe the market-based incentive structures that work for acute disease treatments aren't a good fit for broad preventative public health measures like vaccines.
The upside is immense even considering just existing diseases, but we are really bad at pricing things that improve the status quo vs prevent bad things.
The theory, assuming a delivery mechanism is found, is rock solid---"if not when"---and I therefore wouldn't call it a gamble.
On the other hand, I don't know enough about the biology to speak to the difficulty and uncertainty around delivery mechanisms. Can we get more info on that? I suspect it wasn't too uncertain, though "oh, we change this base pair a bit and the immune system doesn't care" does seem like a relatively unplanned discovery.
In more than medicine, there's a good argument that only monopolies can afford R&D (c.f. Bell Labs) and monopolies are also terrible, so I'm pretty down on leaving R&D to the private sector anyways. Remember we already publicly fund all the R, this just about the D.
Also, ownership, and IP ownership in general, far from being the natural order of things, is an extremely weird and hard to price financial instrument. I don't see the point of forcing it, and trying to make it work with e.g. adjustable patent lengths. That just feels like an epicycle that's very prone to regulatory capture.
The science funding climate, at least in the US (I don't really know what goes on elsewhere) is in a really sad state. Projects with a low probability of success are really hard to get funded but that is precisely what you need to come up with really novel things. Curiously, science funding bodies don't seem to think of things in a probabilistic way.
The second issue is the same idea, but applied to industry. There is an activation energy that you need to surpass in order to make any business profitable. If we are talking about building a business around a brand new and unproven (in a business sense) technology like mRNA, the barrier is _huge_. You need entities with very deep pockets to accept year after year of losses before you can start getting a viable business producing cutting-edge products.
In both cases I think intelligent use of government funds could be a big help. I am not big on socialism, but I have long held that this is one of the most important things a government can and should provide: subsidies for risky research and business endeavors, not to mention large-scale infrastructure projects.
In particular, if we start funding the both research & development, the public sector starts taking on all risk, so there is 0 reason to reward the private sector with IP ownership. Do a drug bounty, and then public domain the IP. I would say have the state hold the IP and license it out with cost controls, but I think having medicare actually negotiate will do that well enough.
edit: An example would be Dengvaxia.
Zika: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04064905
Influenza: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31079849/
That fact that we fund all this basic research, but then can hardly be bothered with the development part of "R&D" seems like a pretty strong anecdote in favor.
Or re-focus the monetary models around either markets or patient outcomes. Right now, medicine is not a market, it's a strange game. The most money that can be made is finding a treatment that may provide a modest increased benefit over what is live, then sell it to medicare at "name your own price". This incentives high probability wins (which are typically things we already understand well).
- They are preventative. Americans are scared that regular people walk into hospitals and debt peons walk out. We are too sickly and scared for preventative medicine, and like our infrastructure which is never maintained to the point of being in "good working order".
- They are O(1) dose. The unity economics of once-and-done is bad. Better to sell something which makes a customer for life.
It's really depressing.
Because money. Operation warp speed started mass manufacturing at the same time as clinical trials. 70% of drugs fail the 3rd stage of trials, so that would be a hugely wasteful endeavor to parallelize this when failure is the norm.
Safety? I'm not wild about new vaccines requiring emergency use authorization and indemnity for the manufacturer. It worked out fine for COVID, but this is not a model I would _want_ to replicate.
As such, the Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna could not have been developed pre-2018, and - absent a deadly pandemic that requires taking extreme measures (such as using very large trial groups) to hasten the timeline - normally vaccines undergo development over a period of many years[3] to collect sufficient data to ensure effectiveness and to ensure that the long-term side effects are well understood. Moderna in particular was, prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, working on developing vaccines to target cancer using mRNA technology[4]. Had the pandemic not occurred, one would therefore not expect to have seen any approved therapies until the mid-to-late 2020s at the earliest (and probably later, given how often vaccines and other drugs fail in human trials).
In short, the issue was not that pharmaceutical companies were disregarding the technology, so much as simply the last remaining breakthrough needed to be made - and now that mRNA vaccines have proven themselves to be safe and effective, there'll be no shortage of effort to apply them to new diseases.
[1] - https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/ [2] - https://www.statnews.com/2020/12/01/how-nanotechnology-helps... [3] - https://www.historyofvaccines.org/content/articles/vaccine-d... [4] - https://www.statnews.com/2017/01/10/moderna-trouble-mrna/
You can absolutely kill or at least maim a new medical technology if you push it on the market too far and a wave of serious side effects hits you. As an example: death of Jesse Gelsinger [0] delayed genetic therapies by several years, possibly a decade or more. Scientists were afraid to touch the tools that killed a young man and produced a public backlash.
I'm really glad that we've developed these great mRNA vaccines, and I hope that a business drive for recurring revenue doesn't chase people back to merely looking for treatments.
I’d love for my kids to be able to play in the weeds and woods with abandon the way I did.
I work with a number of people who will not get an mRNA vaccine until they are better understood.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/different...
If they wanted to do a good job, the information should come from a trustworthy source, it should present the best arguments against the vaccine, and discuss the merits and lack thereof of those arguments. It should genuinely present the risks and the benefits and a good analysis of the tradeoffs. This document clearly falls well short.
You can't expect to convince people like this.
The problem of course is that in deploying it, you’ll inevitably kill a bunch of your own - no population is so consistent you won’t kill a bunch of senior leaders who had parents 3 generations ago who were transracial or whatever and lied about it - and it will inevitably turn everyone in the world against you.
Even states like NK or Iran need friends, and those friends would have enough casualties from anything like this there is no scenario I can imagine anyone would intentionally release something like that.
Doesn’t mean a mad scientist type would cook it up accidentally in the garage, but there are always real world constraints stopping wide spread (physics sometimes, often effectiveness limits or the like).
Near as I can tell, every industrialized power has gone through the phase.
The comment about nukes is weird, since I believe the US is the only power to ever nuke someone in anger - and near as I can tell, plausibly used it as little as possible and in self defense (though we could talk ourselves blue in the face on that point).
Nothing would have stopped the US from carpet nuking Japan for instance at the time, except some minor logistical hiccups.
My comment about Iran and NK is specifically because they’re consistently isolated by (and start fights/ideologically align themselves opposite) the bulk of countries.
They’ve been, and continue to encourage being ‘others’. I pointed out, they still have no incentive to wipe any groups out/start targeted plagues, wouldn’t start something like this, so why would anyone else?
Could somebody explain to me what a PVC (Personalized Cancer Vaccine) is? Like what is the personalized part in there? Is there really a realistic scenario in which we'll get some regular vaccination and then we'll be cancer free in the future?
The general, inherent hurdle in cancer treatment is discriminating individualist, misbehaving cells from cooperative, healthy ones.
From what I got, p53 isn't not expressed in healthy cells, but rather inactivated. Therefore it may be possible to systemically restore it in all cells, without inducing apoptosis in well-behaving cells.
This would be exciting, because it would enable cancer treatment avoiding selection based on cell signature, or "finding a target". Effectively restoring functionality of cell cycle guardians, which will then suicide the cancer cells seems like an attack vector very hard to evade for cancer cells. You wouldn't ask "who is misbehaving?", but rather shortly reign "everybody does as I say, now!".
Cancer cells can get rid of all the surface proteins (targeted by immunotherapy) and even gain root acce.. omnipotent stem cell characteristics (game over), they cannot shake the programmatic hallmarks of cancer, without stop being cancer. And the most important feature isn't rabid metabolism (targeted by chemo), but unchecked cell division. Chemo doesn't work well on indolent/non-aggressive cancers, as their metabolic signature is not discriminating. But who cares, if cells lost e.g. the p53 altogether, if we can force the machinery onto them regardless? No need to diff/patch the source, bring the bytecode to the compiler and fix the system until broken for good. All we want is them to "wake up" briefly and take responsibility for the mess they got at hand.
(Of course, it wouldn't be possible to flood the body with "activated p53", as that would probably suicide all cells (although it makes for a pretty scifi murder-agent), and the activation itself may offer an escape... until people figure out the whole shop.)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P53 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hallmarks_of_Cancer
CureVac's pipeline can be found here on page 6: https://www.curevac.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/20210421-...
The know-how and hardware of today are just enough for the 1.0 of mRNA vaccines, so to say. How will the fourth or fifth generation look like, is probably beyond our imagination right now.
What?! Katalin Karikó is an SVP at BioNTech, the lab that created Pfizer's vaccine.
https://www.statnews.com/2020/11/10/the-story-of-mrna-how-a-... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/08/health/coronavirus-mrna-k...
The headline doesn't make that all that clear, but everything about the article seems to.
If someone is spending money on something, they are voting that it is important FOR THEM - and more important than whatever else they would have done with the money.
If politicians/government aren’t spending money on something - despite saying it’s important - that is a very clear signal that their words and their actions do not align. We have words for that too.
If they don’t even bother saying words about it, then that is a clear signal not enough pressure is being applied to make it even a pretend priority no?
* They're expensive (~4-8 dollars per follicle) with a single transplant being 1000-5000 follicles. Severely bald men may need multiple
* There is a finite number of follicles that can be transplanted.
* Permanent scarring in the donor zone.
The ultimate treatment would be either hair cloning (still a ways out, very expensive) or a way to reactivate the dormant follicles. Presumably if you could solve the latter you would become very rich very quickly.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/01/13/1016098/moderna-...
They can retool very, very quickly. The slight unknown is running another trial.
I have no idea why people don't question anything about the capabilities/consequences of this tech.
“The most worrisome part, he said, is that antibodies also can make subsequent infections worse, creating so-called antibody-dependent enhancement. Two vaccines — one against a coronavirus in cats and another against dengue, a flavivirus that affects humans — had to be withdrawn because the antibodies they induced caused potentially fatal reactions. If an antibody binds weakly against these viruses or falls to low levels, it can fail to “neutralize” the virus, but instead help it get into cells.”
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/09/09/for-an-effective-covid-...
"Immortality is not something that that will ever be achievable"
well, noted.
Jokes aside, I'm surprised at the rather negative response. As a medical problem, you're looking at not just cosmetic applications, but also treatments for not-uncommon disfigurement or injury, and the phasing out of existing, quite brutal, leg-lengthening surgeries. Philosophically, you have the issue of bodily agency, and the opportunity to remove that particular source of interpersonal disparity and discontent. Scientifically, I'd think it an interesting problem, one that seemed as implacable as death, except that it isn't, because we have brute-force methods to circumvent the proscriptions of the natural process.
Figured that would be something HN would be eager to chat about.
Edit: why people downvote the truth? I guess none of you suffered this and I hope you will not, but silencing a voice like that is inhumane.
Worth reviewing the site guidelines here:
https://www.nccih.nih.gov/nih-pain-research-center/research-...
“Pain” is almost never the disease. (OK, maybe CRPS.) There’s a lot of things that cause pain, almost self-evidently, so it’s not one particular thing to attack, unlike a virus.
(Also we are at 36 states now with medical marijuana, so I think the “pharma wants to block this” ship has sailed, especially when you consider big-hitters like California and New York have full recreational marijuana now.)
VAERS data released today showed 118,902 reports of adverse events following COVID vaccines, including 3,544 deaths and 12,619 serious injuries between Dec. 14, 2020 and April 23, 2021: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/vaers-significan...
The Orange County Coroner's office is investigating the death of a woman who died just days after she received her second dose of the Moderna vaccine: https://abc7.com/health/oc-womans-death-after-vaccination-sp...
Meanwhile: Using a protocol of zinc, hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin and one antibiotic in combination with inhaled budesonide and/or intramuscular dexamethasone... The early ambulatory treatment regimen was associated with estimated 87.6% reduction in hospitalization and 74.9% reduction in death (p<0.0001): https://trialsitenews.com/texas-physician-researchers-case-s...
They investigate each death reported to VAERS to see if it was actually vaccine related. Given how many millions of doses were given out, and especially to people that were already old or clinging on to life, 3,544 is not unexpected. None of those were directly attributable to the vaccine.
Your third link is not remotely relevant. The article is not discussing covid treatments, but rather the category of vaccine. Zinc isn’t going to cure cancer.
"Evolving and compelling evidence exists that proves that zinc is implicated as an important cytotoxic/tumor suppressor agent in several cancers. For example, that cellular zinc levels are markedly decreased in prostate cancer is well established" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3291177/
Zinc: A promising agent in dietary chemoprevention of cancer https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3102454/
"Many epidemiological studies have shown a relationship between the zinc content in the diet and the risk of cancer" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6835436/
" In addition, zinc contributes to the truncation of the Krebs cycle and inhibition of citrate oxidation, which further prevents cancer cell growth and proliferation, as well as inhibiting the invasion and migration of cancer cells" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7216164/
"The present meta-analysis suggested that serum zinc levels were significantly lower in lung cancer patients than that in controls." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6503426/
"In conclusion, we found that highest category of dietary zinc intake can significantly reduce the risk of pancreatic cancer, especially among American populations." https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5463257/
"Increased risk of cancer mortality associated with cadmium exposures in older Americans with low zinc intake" https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23151207/
And the list continues: https://www.google.com/search?q=nih.gov+zinc+cancer