Excision's CRISPR HIV therapy is heading into human testing after FDA clearance
fiercebiotech.com
fiercebiotech.com
It’s cool tech but it’s not magic.
Easy to measure correlates of protection like antibodies wane over time, as expected from any vaccine. T-cells say a lot more about long term protection but are harder to measure. Generally, alarmist antibody research makes the headlines instead. I recommend the TWiV podcast by virologists and immunologists, which notably existed before covid.
Two examples:
1) Israel data shows high level of breakthrough infection. This is the basis for their booster policy:
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-doctors-fi...
2) Moderna just released their own study showing reinfection rates at 2x at 13+ months relative to <8 months post second dose.
https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-d...
Why that happens is less clear though. Is it a fault of mRNA tech itself? Or the dosing schedule? 21 days is very close together for a 2 dose vaccine, most are 6 months or years apart.
Using 21 days was a good way to get the trials done fast, if they'd used 6 months we'd be where we were 5 months ago, but this was one of the risks. Canada, which spaced doses out further, isn't seeing nearly as high of a rate of breakthrough cases.
I'm not saying we can conclude definitely that dosing is the problem, but it's a question worth investigating before coming to any firm conclusions that mRNA vaccines aren't good enough.
Moderna while still seeming to suffer from this problem seems to be suffering less than Biontech, they are very similar in general, biggest difference is Moderna having already a longer minimum waiting period between the shots and a way bigger dose of mRNA per shot. So this may already be a hint.
Also currently it looks like a third shot is giving a really great boost compared to the second one, at least in the short term. Same with using mRNA as a booster shot after a vector based vaccine.
Now, if there is any prior exposure to the disease among participants (this isn't always known, esp. for something like COVID), and if there is any natural immunity that accrues, this will pull that ratio towards 1 (VE=0)
Probably the worst part about Covid-19 is that Sars-CoV-2 was a totally new Virus with a high attack rate, on top of the danger to the individual patient. If most of the population has seen "something like" it, even very distant variants will not be as bad.
AZ is conceptually similar to the mRNA vaccines actually. They all target the Spike protein.
The Chinese vaccine is an inactivated virus kind of vaccine. That's what you would call traditional. Low protection from infection, but supposedly high protection from dangerous disease onset.
* https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/herpes-simp...
https://www.reddit.com/r/HerpesCureResearch/comments/kg66ds/...
Perhaps this could help: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.excision.bio/techn...
This can’t possibly be correct. It’s the most commonly diagnosed etiology for viral encephalitis, which definitely occurs more than a single digit per million. It’s also going to be underdiagnosed because the diagnostics are bad (fewer than half of encephalitis cases are assigned an etiology). I see several sources saying in the range of 2-4,000 confirmed HSV encephalitis cases per year in the US (which are usually extremely severe, leading to brain damage or death), compared to 5,500 “HIV-related” deaths per year in the US according to the CDC. So at the very least they seem similar in magnitude.
Around 680k people died of AIDS related illnesses in 2020 alone. https://www.unaids.org/en/resources/fact-sheet
Also the number of HIV infected people is still increasing.
* https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/excision-biotherapeu...
Just like the renaissance that came after the dark ages.
This is in labs and startups all over the world. It's like a gold rush right now.
I love the engine of capitalism and free market, but when you're in ill health, you really need all the help you can get.
I was reading somewhere where people linked price growth to growth of medical insurance, the point was that add soon as people stopped print from their own pockets they stopped caring and started to take whatever doctors said and the companies started marketing to doctors and making agreements with then and so on and do on. Can't find the link unfortunately.
All this will do in mid and long term is that they'll jack prices up even higher because they can, just like what government did to college loans.
I was reading somewhere where people linked price growth to growth of medical insurance, the point was that as soon as people stopped paying from their own pockets they stopped caring and started to take whatever doctors said and the companies started marketing to doctors and making agreements with them and so on and so on. Can't find the link unfortunately.
I also was taken aback by the full on defense of 'capitalism' as it relates to the covid shots.
That was not a freemarket driven choice. It was paid for by the US government via tax payers. To conflate them because of social purpose, or whatever ideology people want is just wrong.
They stand to make decades of profit and it wasn't some high moral road. It was only for money.
And yes, money goes back to investors who often reinvest it into biotech.
If you make a billion dollars on biotech... it has to go somewhere (banks are for chumps!), so it's going back into either the public market, or venture capital. And if you made a billion on biotech once....
[1] https://www.hiv.gov/blog/long-acting-injectable-form-hiv-pre...
The UK is on track to eliminate HIV transmission within the decade [1] [2] assuming PrEP use within and near high risk populations. So, to answer your question ("is everyone going to take PrEP all of the time?"), that seems like a reasonable solution until a vaccine is approved for prevention and a CRISPR protocol is developed for therapy in the already infected. It may even take some time for HIV production to ramp, making prEP even more important so the at risk don't get complacent and an unnecessary bump in infections occurs.
(it's important to note that kidney function should be monitored in those on PrEP)
[1] https://www.aidsmap.com/news/nov-2017/uk-moving-towards-elim...
[2] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/how-likely-is-engl...
Cancer. It's always cancer.
Neurogeneration, mutation of gametes, accidental sterilisation. Let me be very clear - I'm NOT promoting an anti-science viewpoint here or saying that progress is a bad thing. I'm simply stating that we're in possession of powerful new tools and if we aren't careful, we're going to end up with more Thalidomide babies or worse.
Applying this new technology on people and then measuring the outcome is not an appropriate or ethical strategy. It's not appropriate because the consequences could be very hard to detect or not present themselves for decades. And it's not ethical because it's harder to predict what could go wrong.
And then you’re throwing in unrelated historical situations “Thalidomide babies” to evoke the “think of the children” argument, provoking moral outrage.
Finally you throw up a straw man to imply that science doesn’t generally use ethical practices, of which you provide no evidence for.
"Pfizer to Pay $2.3 Billion for Fraudulent Marketing" - https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/johnson-johnson-pay-more-22-b...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/us-pharmaceutical-company-mer...
To which we can add Eli Lilly, Amgen, Astrazenica, Actelion, Purdue Pharma all of whom have been fined upwards of $200 million. And these are only the big fish. Of course most scientific activity takes place such that ethical considerations don't arise. When they do however, it would seem that making a default judgment of their ethical probity is definitely problematic.
There was "no evidence" for the vaccines causing Myocarditis when they were rolled out. Now there's strong evidence and the concerns are growing. This trial reported Myocarditis rates at 1:1000 in a group with median age 33:
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.09.13.21262182v...
This is three times higher than what the FDA estimated for the highest risk group (males aged 16-17), based on VAERS data:
https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/acip/meetings/downloads/slides-...
As for neurodegeneration, there is a concern that Codon-optimization[2] used for mRNA vaccines[3] can trigger it. It's simply not possible to gather evidence of that in the current approval timeframe, we just assume that the risk outweighs the benefit, come hell and high water. That may be a reasonable assumption for at-risk groups, but not for everyone.
[2] https://blog.addgene.org/to-codon-optimize-or-not-that-is-th...
This report was based erroneous data. Revised numbers are closer to VAERS data.
Thalidomide may be unrelated pharmaceutically, but the EUA for Moderna was issued almost exactly 9 months after the very first phase 1 trial started. How many pregnancies were brought from conception to full-term through that testing? CRISPR has the ability to modify genetic material in reproductive cells, causing heritable germline modifications. How do we test that?
Unfortunately the pandemic is distorting this conversation. There are too many subtexts around widespread rapid adoption, conflict around mandatory vaccination, avoidance of severe societal hazards, etc.
That's one of the reasons I hesitated to even comment with concern on this topic and why I had to make it clear I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
Unfortunately everybody's kneejerk reaction to any kind of skepticism or concern on this topic is to label them as a 5G sterilisation nutcase.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excision
Excision may refer to:
* ...
* Type II female genital mutilation
In molecular biology it refers to removing a sequence of genetic material, so it's quite appropriate for this therapy.