mRNA cancer therapy now in human trials after shrinking mouse tumours
newscientist.com
newscientist.com
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3836174/
and from a previous HN discussion about that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18826833) I also found this:
The biggest issues IMHO with cancer vaccines in the past has been your bodies natural ability to prevent your immune system from attacking itself. With the discovery/invention of checkpoint inhibitors like Keytruda, we may finally have a way to allow your immune system to attack yourself by co-administering Keytruda with the vaccine against your cancer cells [1].
Another reason cancer vaccines may finally show promise is mRNA inherently has the ability to drive an immune response (see BNT162b2/Comirnaty) that elicits T-cell specific to the protein you're coding for. It is believed that cancer-epitope CD8 T-cells specifically are critical for anticancer vaccines, but even if you get good CD8 cells, the second it binds the cancer cell it gets shutdown by the checkpoint proteins on the surface of the cancer cell. If you add a CPI, boom, you don't prevent the CD8 from shutting down and you get cell killing!
It is very exciting, yet it will probably take a decade until these inventions will become available in the market. Medicine is painfully slow.
[1] https://investors.modernatx.com/static-files/834b6509-553f-4...
Today, tumor removal means cutting a big hole in the skull, digging and scraping and trying to remove all of the tumor, then closing it all up and hoping you didn't cause any serious brain damage while you did all this. I mean, we use the term 'brain surgery' to mean something overly complex, detailed, and confusing.
My father had it done in March and we were warned ahead of time that he may go blind, or may have unexpected personality changes. It was all very frightening though he came out just fine, except for a wicked scar.
But imagine if instead, doctors could drill a tiny hole just large enough for a needle, inject some mRNA into the tumor and release the patient the same day.
1. "mRNA" is still new tech in the public eyes, so it'll take some time to familiarize people with it and not see it as "scary new tech".
2. Covid is (fortunately) less deadly than initially feared, which lead to people not being very worried about it at a personal risk level. If mRNA therapy start rolling out for cancer, you bet people will take it.
Why don't we have an inactivated virus or subunit (i.e. Novavax) vaccine as an option?
The point of getting vaccinated is not to protect yourself, as much as to protect your community. I view people who won't take the vaccine because they perceive their personal risk as low to be selfish. Additionally, anyone who won't get vaccinated because they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do is childish.
The point is first and foremost, and by a long way, to protect yourself. Herd immunity is a by-product of mass immunisation programmes, not the main goal.
> I view people who won't take the vaccine because they perceive their personal risk as low to be selfish
If their personal risk is low (as opposed to perceived low), which it is for the vast majority, then they're not having a selfish effect on others as they won't be taking up medical resources they shouldn't. If there's any "selfish" people - according to this strange standard you've built - it's those with high risk due to comorbidities they could've done something about, like their weight, and I wouldn't for one second paint them as some kind of moral deviants, they're people who need help in the short term and long.
> Additionally, anyone who won't get vaccinated because they don't want anyone else to tell them what to do is childish.
To make your own decisions and take your own risks is the mark of an adult because adulthood is about taking responsibility on, not abrogating it. Whether they are good decisions is a different discussion.
Edit: BTW I do not support mandated COVID vaccination. I just wish more people would think of the societal good instead of "muh freedoms" when making choices. Especially when certain side effects of vaccines actually happen at a higher incidence rate from getting COVID then from the vaccine (I.E. myocarditis).
Not drunk driving doesn't require you to put something in your body.
However, I agree that many people refusing the vaccine aren’t doing it based on sound reasoning (beyond the freedom argument) or are well informed on the matter. Again, however, the government and media have the lion’s share of responsibility here, they haven’t been honest nor transparent, and they’ve politicised things that should never be political - just think “Trump”, “hydroxychloroquine”, and “the Lancet” and you’ll get an immediate insight into where the lack of trust comes from, and those no shortage of examples (this week’s is “Joe Rogan” and “ivermectin”, can we just wait for a larger scale study to come in before rubbishing this stuff?)
Some old dictionary> Oats: A food for horses in England and men in Scotland.
Eh, we’ll just see a split in the population between the vaccinated and disease riddled. The Amish similarly split in the industrial revolution and they’re, for the most part, doing fine and not ruining it for the rest of us.
Given the current research paths and traction, that future list of preventable diseases looks likely to include most STIs. That will motivate young people such that it cleaves off the current voluntarily unvaccinated generation.
Long story short, this is likely to be a temporary phenomenon. That, or a hard split for a self-selecting minority. (We’re already seeing economic effects in skilled labor hiring.)
The rest of people who don't want to take the vaccine recognise the goods the vaccine can do but: - They don't care about avoiding mild covid effects if they think they're healthy enough - They don't know which long term effects mRNA vaccines will have, if any (10+ years) - They oppose compulsory or practically compulsory (if I can't travel or visit a bar, it's practically compulsory) vaccines for a disease with a sub 1% mortality rate, which keeps having different variants which drop vaccine efficacy, which still requires you to wear a mask not to transmit it.
As it is right now, the only reason to take the vaccine is not to feel covid symptoms / reduce the damage to your organs by covid, which is a decent reason.
I got covid towards the beginning of the "two weeks lockdown to flatten the curve turned in 1.5 years", I felt flu-like bad but barely had any issues. Yet last summer I was forced to vaccinate because proof of recovery older than 6 months is worthless to travel and to spend hundreds in useless covid tests. I also had zero symptoms after both vaccinations, probably because my body already knew how to fight it.
Sure, the government really makes it harder and harder to believe in anything they say, but the number of conspiracy nuts remained constant. It's just that society started calling people who care about individual freedom, conspiracy nuts (on top of nazi and white supremacists).
This is obviously false antivax nonsense. The COVID vaccine, by and large, prevents you from dying or ending up in the ICU.
> It's just that society started calling people who care about individual freedom, conspiracy nuts (on top of nazi and white supremacists).
Or we're just tired of people buying into antivax propaganda and dying and wasting hospital resources?
Obesity is even more wasteful of hospital resources.
The main problem with covid is the tempo it spreads. Covid symptoms are not that bad, most of victims survive, but because it spreads so fast, that ~5 percent of hard cases can overwhelm a country. THAT is the problem, but almost no one adresses it in comments on forums, instead they give comparisons to other diseases which have completely other problems.
It's very contagious if you come in contact with certain bodily fluids. ORs, and traditional rooms in hospitals are sterilized with bleach after a stay from an HIV positive patient. There's even plenty of stories of Dr's and surgeons contracting it when they've slipped with a scalpel or needle.
Further are you 100% confident people are not bleeding on shared surfaces and that other people do not come in contact with this? In SF I once saw a woman slip in a homeless person's urine, with her hitting the sidewalk and breaking skin with her arm in the urine. Wanna play guess the disease there?
> The main problem with covid is the tempo it spreads.
Great so self isolate since you're scared. In fact I see most of the problem being with the vaccinated thinking they're totally safe, and not using a mask. They still get the virus, still spread it, and yet they think they're not the problem.
Yeah, IF you come in contact with certain bodily fluids. We don't do that everyday, but we do it everyday with airborne diseases when breathing. So, it's not THAT contagious. I've heard stories of doctors being infected when trying to help some junkie who started being aggressive.
> Further are you 100% confident people are not bleeding on shared surfaces and that other people do not come in contact with this?
I've seen such occurence maybe once every several years where I live. Typically it's because of some acident and it's cleaned in reasonable time.
> In SF I once saw a woman slip in a homeless person's urine
We don't shit on sidewalks, homeless here are a very rare sight, I don't remember seeing one since at least a month.
> Great so self isolate since you're scared.
I'm not scared, I'm vaccinated and still use mask. I'm currently self-isolating because I've got some mild cough and don't want to spread whatever I have, I've cancelled todays dinner with remote (other country) coworker who I would see live first time since a year, but that could mean spreading some flu to him and others in restaurant.
> In fact I see most of the problem being with the vaccinated thinking they're totally safe, and not using a mask.
I'm 100% with you about this. They should isolate more. Now, what was your argument again?
Did I not just give an example of this? Maybe not for you, but for some people it is very much possible to come into contact with these body fluids on a daily basis, if not multiple times a day.
> I've seen such occurence maybe once every several years where I live.
You can see droplets of blood? What's your vision like? Are you also aware blood can be in coughs?
> We don't shit on sidewalks, homeless here are a very rare sight, I don't remember seeing one since at least a month.
Again, just your location.
> I'm not scared
If you're not scared you wouldn't be here arguing anything about COVID atm.
> I'm 100% with you about this.
Great! Something we can agree on.
PrEP exists. But it’s costly and tedious. When we have an HIV vaccine that’s free and two shots, yes, it would make sense to restrict those who choose to be infected.
To prevent hospitals overrun by sick people.
If more people get vaccine, I'm for ending with isolation or other pandemic safety measures. Those who didn't want to vaccinate can die if they want to. The problem AT THIS MOMENT is that there is too many unvaccinated people, so when covid spreads, hospitals will be overflowed and other people will die from other preventable diseases from lack of care.
Well, no
It reduces severity and incidence of disease. Yes, you can still get covid if you encounter SARS-Cov-2. But you are less likely to. And if you are less likely to get the disease, you reduce the risk of infection to others.
You seem very certain. I'm not convinced. Some of them are simply making things up. I had one of my coaches try to show me a video of a guy sticking spoons to his body trying to tell me it was the vaccine making him magnetic.
How do you reconcile "hey, once we can show that long term side effects are non-existent" with "because there aren't enough side effects right now, they're just inventing completely crazy nonsense that defies all logic"?
The person in question isn't even a fringe conspiracy theorist, she just browsed Facebook a little too much, this is just mainstream stuff...
None has disowned me.
My point is, it’s not fair to lump them into one big Idiocracy category.
Becoming? Becoming!?
Vaccines for many infectious diseases are mandatory (with some exceptions) to enter for public schools in all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico. They are also mandatory to immigrant to the United States. The supreme court first upheld mandatory vaccinations as constitutional in 1905, more than a century ago (Jacobson v. Massachusetts).
Mandatory vaccinations have been a thing since we've had vaccinations.
What the vaccine passport debate centers around is whether it is fair to require vaccines for entry into events and businesses.
By all means, now that the government paid for it with our tax money I'll take it and skip the mild covid side effects for my age range. If I had to pay, unless I was 40+, I wouldn't have bothered for something with such a low mortality rate.
This could be the reason the WHO has been scaring everyone for the last two years for something with such a low mortality rate. Or maybe even why American tax dollars were spent on gain-of-function research in a laboratory in China!
Maybe this was all a tax payers funded friendly fundraiser to beat cancer with mRNA!
I'm sure tons of smart educated authoritarian people wouldn't refrain from manipulating entire populations for such a noble goal.
> And those issues, among others, are what has kept the cancer vaccine field from taking off, mRNA-powered or not. Pre-pandemic, Moderna was working on these, and no doubt they still are. But whereas we could go from "new pathogen" to "new vaccine" in about a year (an amazing feat, to be sure), developing any similarly effective cancer vaccine is already in the "decades and counting" category. There's a huge amount of promise in this area, but don't expect it to zip along like a viral vaccine might be able to.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/what-mrna-good-and...
i think the idea was not just cancer therapies, but personalized cancer therapies with custom mrnas derived from biopsy material.
Note: Just to be sure if you didn't knew. It doesn't work :)
After some recent health developments, I'm very happy to see this one moving along!
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/research/biontech-reports-prom...
How often the solution to complex problems is still kinda of "throw some money at it"?
Edit: haha acquire a sense of humor folks