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Comment by 8f2ab37a-ed6c | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we'll see HSV also addressed by this new wave of mRNA vaccines, or if it's just not top of mind for companies and researchers due to its "mostly benign" nature. At least until one's immune system starts to weaken with advanced age and it starts to cause all sorts of problems, but perhaps by then it gets swept under the "problems of aging" rug.

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Dr. Friedman and team at UPenn are working on exactly this. An mRNA based prophylactic (and also potentially therapeutic) vaccine for HSV. I think they were originally using some other form of vaccine (a protein vaccine?), but then realized that mRNA was a lot better. He has posted a few video updates on the progress, and it looks good, but of course it hasn't entered phase 1 yet (supposed to start this year).

Yes there are multiple efforts with that one being I think the most promising. They hope to cure the first humans of HSV in 2024. I believe they have all the funding they need for now, having raised over $500k.

More details on this subreddit and specifically this sticky: https://www.reddit.com/r/HerpesCureResearch/comments/kg66ds/...

It's interesting how small some of those grants and funding pools are compared to what you see in startup land.

Maybe this is just the economics of viral research, but you'd think that with plenty of people out there willing to pay to cure themselves of HSV, or prevent it, there would be more financial support.

Yet, the people working on the problem have as much funding as the YC Standard Deal announced this month. I wonder why.

Vaccines and cures deliver one time revenue, whereas treatments deliver perpetually recurring revenue. It's a well known market failure in healthcare.

I feel the same way. So much money gets thrown around to solve relatively trivial problems, but I suppose it is like a casino where you hope to win. Whereas no one funding this research expects a financial return.

But you’d think that for example you could consider the tax payers as a body which would generally appreciate a cure to HSV. We could imagine the government funding such things. We just dropped an F-35 in the ocean in the South China Sea. I wonder how much research you could fund for the price of one of those.

Yeah, after seeing game studios being bought for 64B dollars, how many HSVs could that cure?

I have an interest in this too, with most of the worlds population infected with some type HSV and being linked to Alzheimer's disease, MS and many horrible disease.

It's about time we defeat HSV too!

Epstein-barr virus is in that same category of “lots of latent, lifelong infections that are maybe linked to a ton of age-related diseases in weird ways”. No idea if it’s a potential target, but would be pretty cool!

Ask and you shall receive:

https://www.umassmed.edu/news/news-archives/2022/01/phase-i-...

Very cool!

Well just be careful. If the disease is caused by latent virus in the brain triggering chronic inflammatory response in the brain creating ROS that degrade brain maintenance mechanism (which is a reasonable hypothesis) -- creating a stronger inflammatory response might accelerate the onset of the disease, not prevent it.

I think we need to do a much better job at wiping out these "mostly benign" viruses. I suspect we'll someday learn they drastically increase your cancer risk, like we did with HPV and male throat cancer.

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