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Comment by sbelskie | Hacker News Reader

This does not appear to be a preventative treatment. It treats existing melanoma by inducing the body to produce antibodies against it, no?

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It's also personalized, which to me says that it's unique and each could have different likelihood of autoimmune response.

   The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These 
   are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the 
   vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens 
   on their cancer cells.

It is intended for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed, to prevent cancer from coming back.

You’re both right. It’s preventative, not prophylactic.

We’re strict with the latter because they’re administered to healthy adults. That doesn’t apply here. If you took every coronavirus mRNA vaccine side effect and multiplied the severity and frequency by two orders of magnitude, this vaccine would still be worth it for many with melanoma.

The reason preventative treatments are held to a higher standard is because they are given to a very large number of people who might never get the disease anyway. Hence, a 1 in 1000 risk is significant. If you are treating people who have had cancer, their risk of getting it again in much higher than 1 in 1000.

Right. There's also the fact that the FDA will accept much worse side effects for a cancer treatment than they would for (e.g.) an athlete's foot treatment.

For a bad cancer like some melanomas, just about anything that doesn't kill the patient outright is gonna be on the table.

Not just antibodies, but it will stimulate a broad class of immune cells.

And yes, the name vaccine is misleading. They should use immunotherapy.

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