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Comment by CommanderData | Hacker News Reader

How about HSV-1/2? Combined this virus is present in about 2/3 people in the US, and resides dormant near the brain (with cold sores).

I thought there's already a strong link with HSV and Dementia, is there any more research looking at this virus and a vaccine?

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Yes Ruth Itzaki has been talking about this for years. https://www.beingpatient.com/ruth-itzhaki-alzheimers-viruses...

Potential Rosalind Franklin scenario.

https://www.healthspan.dev is making a mRNA vaccine. Sam Altman funded company.

Not going to be surprised if the most common viruses are what leads to cancer and mRNA is what becomes a cancer preventative as protocols ramp against said viruses.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1994798/

> An estimated 15 percent of all human cancers worldwide may be attributed to viruses, representing a significant portion of the global cancer burden. Both DNA and RNA viruses have been shown to be capable of causing cancer in humans. Epstein-Barr virus, human papilloma virus, hepatitis B virus, and human herpes virus-8 are the four DNA viruses that are capable of causing the development of human cancers. Human T lymphotrophic virus type 1 and hepatitis C viruses are the two RNA viruses that contribute to human cancers.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25083895/

Kudos to anyone accelerating mRNA in this space.

But why mRNA specifically instead of a protein or other vaccine? What’s the advantage?

mrna vaccines are a lot harder for viruses to mutate away from (and easier to adapt if they do) because they let you target a gene sequence directly.

That doesn't really make sense. Target specifically, and it only takes a minor mutation to escape.

A less-specific vaccine would create immunity against multiple targets, and would logically require more simultaneous mutations to create an escape variant.

Unless your goal is to sell a new vaccine every year (chase your own escape variants, immunity-as-a-service), then MRNA isn't obviously a win.

Not an expert, but couldn’t the mRNA vaccine target only part of the virus genome that’s stable across mutations/variants? That would give you a broad vaccine resistant to mutations

Stable across mutations? On what timeframe.. Its been stable so far.

However, create a population with narrow immunity based on a single protein, and you create a selection pressure that incentivizes mutations in that protein. Once a successful mutation exists, it has a wide open field to spread unchecked. With broad immunity (multiple proteins) it is much less likely that a variant can realize the multiple simultaneous mutations that would be required to spread effectively.

> Target specifically, and it only takes a minor mutation to escape.

1) Not all sections of a virus mutate at the same rate. Some sections of a virus are highly conserved or the virus simply dies. In Covid-19, for example, the spike protein seems to be difficult to change significantly as it provides the primary entry for the virus into cells.

2) mRNA vaccines tell your immune system "target this specific sequence" and can avoid problematic sequences.

Normally, you have no idea what section of the virus your immune system locked onto. Even worse, if your immune system grabs onto something common (EBV pieces causing MS or alpha-gal from a tick bite, for example), it can hose you bad.

Covid-19 is actually a great example. The spike protein was highly conserved until it became advantageous for it mutate to evade the highly-specific immunity created by mRNA vaccines. Then we got Omicron.

For which the original vaccines are still reasonably effective at keeping you out of the hospital (systemic immunity response).

I am awaiting the trials on the ones that actually provoke immunity in the respiratory mucosa. It would be very nice to not get Covid at all.

The one example of mRNA vaccines that we have has resulted in the viruses by and large mutating away from them and they haven't been adapted quickly.

virus mutation rate is proportional to number of infected people, so pandemics will naturally mutate faster. also, the vaccines have been adapted quickly. the pfizer bivalent booster came out 18 months after the regular covid vaccine (9 months after omnicron started circulating) and had extra omnicron protection. that's really fast for drug development (and approximately all of that time was the clinical trial. it's not hard to imagine in a decade or two, that we'll be able to speed up the approval time further as the manufacturers and regulators have more experience with mrna vaccines).

Not sure if this is the case for parent, but there was such a huge marketing push behind the covid vaccines that it's the first thing that jumps to everyone's mind in any vaccine related topic.

It's kind of like after everyone being inundated with talk about covid for years, there is a tendency to assume every health issue is related to it. Some things definitely will be, but it turns out the universe of things that can go wrong with a human body goes far beyond one recent virus.

It's not marketing, mRNA technology is truly a shift in how rapid vaccine development can occur [1] [2].

[1] https://www.jci.org/articles/view/153721

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8905605/

It's not either/or, both things can be true. The mrna vaccines have probably had more resources spent on promoting them than any product in recent history (ie marketing). I would argue that their mindshare is due to that and not some innate ability of the public to know what will be a successful pharmaceutical technology or not.

This is all orthogonal to whether or not the tech eventually delivers on all the possibilities.

I'm half-assedly pulling this out of recollection. I believe nucleic-acid based vaccines prompt a greater response from the part of the adaptive immune system that is not the antibody part, while protein-based vaccines preferentially boost the antibody response. They do this because the antigen is expressed within the cell.

do you know if this vaccine will work for existing dormant infections?

there’s quite a bit of active HSV1/2 work being done although it’s very early stage. a few vaccines. a cure attempt. unfortunately this virus is not seen as a target for funding. some of the labs working on these are just sub-teams of larger companies working to fight other medical challenges such as HIV or cancer. those get the funding and they are able to set side some money for HSV research.

probably because it’s thought of as a simple skin virus when more likely it’s a nervous system virus that manifests most visibly in the skin

Even if there were a strong link between HSV and Dementia, I don't believe our governments would fast track or fund such research because their priorities.

It would be nice if Gates or Elon Musk would bring the worlds attention to these issues and if something positive comes out of it would be a massive net positive to humanity.

priorities are pretty clear. we spent <$20B on the covid vaccine, operation warp speed. ukraine received $75B in the last year from the u. s. if it was the same price, we could have solved 4 highly infectious diseases in just the last year. i’m not trying to get political on that specific war; just military in general is where the money goes

Imagine if, after the first oil crisis, the US had earmarked 10% of the military’s middle east budget to R&D for energy independence.

We would have solved the global warming problem by the mid 1990’s.

A sufficient number of nuclear power plants would have cost a lot less than that.

You can't (well, couldn't) make steel or concrete from electricity from a nuclear power plant. And up until recently you couldn't really drive a car from the electricity from a nuclear power plant. You can't plow or plant a field, or pave a road, or so many other things.

I think if you look at a breakdown in sources of CO2 emissions, it's less than half. Yes, that's a lot, but it's not the whole story.

I'm 100% for getting off fossil fuels. I drive electric. But the transition is a hell of a lot more complex than "build a lot of nuclear power plants."

I didn't expect it to complete replace all fossil fuel -- just almost all the coal + a large share of the oil. Cars would still have used petrol. Heating could have become largely electric. If they really wanted, they could have used synthetic petrol -- but that is rather inefficient.

The US produced (and produces) lots of oil. It would probably have been enough (or close enough) to make the US entirely independent of OPEC oil.

The two proposed solutions were: military (the road taken), very expensive research (not really taken). I added a third one (nuclear) because it was cheaper and it wouldn't have needed much research. It was a known solution that would have gotten the US most (likely all) of the way towards energy independence and it would have reduced CO2 emissions a lot.

And we had multiple covid vaccines within under a year, with holdups being studying effects and approvals. While I agree we overspend on military, I don't think there's evidence spending more money would have improved the covid vaccine situation.

Then the opposite would be true? Less money we would have got the same outcome. Slightly nonsensical.

We need time and more people looking at the issue = money.

Well, the US spends far more on elder care than on the military, so you should say that that is where the money goes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expenditures_in_the_United_S...

Note that those $20B were not for research but for production and rollout. The research costs (for BioNTech) were in the order of only $1B or two. Source (in German): https://archive.is/L5oFm

Though, obviously, no research lives in a vacuum. Companies profit from universities and the larger educational system, from other researchers laying the groundwork over the years etc.

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