5 ms·

It i definitely likely that 2020s will see a lot of sci-fi stuff coming to life.

credit_guy 6y ago
“Definitely” is a big word. Less than two months ago, another attempt at a universal flu vaccine failed in Phase 3 clinical trials [1] [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-companys-bid-for-universal-flu-vaccine-fails-in-clinical-trails/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-companys-bid-for-unive...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hannob 6y ago
  We now have a vaccine where the time from sequencing the virus to the time vaccinating the first patient was less than a year. That already happened. By the standard of every expert I heard commenting on this that pretty much would've been considered scifi before 2020.
  - lyse-ana 6y ago
    Not a domain expert, but it seems so: - https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/ https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/, "How to make a vaccine in record time" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDiyIKUP0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDiyIKUP0M - DeepMind effectively solving protein folding: AlphaFold https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488; the comment by 'dnautics in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306088 seems to validate this. Not to mention the transition from IRL to cyberspace (physical distancing forcing employers to allow remote work; remote schooling; communities meeting online via e.g. Discord, Zoom)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - aphextron 6y ago
    It's really hard to overstate what an advancement mRNA vaccines will be. MRNA-1273, the Moderna vaccine, was designed in two days. As horrible as this pandemic has been, we will probably see an equivalent in vaccine technology advances over the next couple years that we saw in weapons advancement from WWII. These things have the potential to treat/prevent cancer, eradicate the flu, deliver gene therapies, so many things that seemed like scifi just 10 years ago.
    - mxcrossb 6y ago
      The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? I think the real development time boost we saw here was that it was easy to get volunteers and easy to test effectiveness due to the huge number of cases.
      - aphextron 6y ago
        > The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? The Sinovac and Sputnik vaccines are both less effective and have had serious adverse events in their trials. Sputnik hadn't even entered phase 3 trials and they rolled it out. The mRNA vaccines will be the first to pass the bar of FDA approval by a wide margin.
        mxcrossb 6y ago
        Thank you for the information!
    - StavrosK 6y ago
      Would new mRNA vaccines need to undergo stringent safety/efficacy testing as well? As I understand it, you make the bit of mRNA you want and stuff it onto the vector, which then deploys it into the cells. Once the technique is mature and well-understood, wouldn't it be much quicker to roll out vaccines for all sorts of things?
      - 6y ago
  - beagle3 6y ago
    It is impressive and encouraging, but does not shorten the safety period. It may still come out in a year or two (or ten) that this increases the chance for some autoimmune disease in a problematic way, or causes some other problem. The vaccine was created quickly, but as far as I understand we are now better at evaluating safety yet -- the 3-10 years safety study would still have been practiced if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic. The result of not enough testing can be fatal, see e.g. [0] [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/dengue-vaccine-fiasco-leads-criminal-charges-researcher-philippines https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/dengue-vaccine-fiasc...
    - CorrectHorseBat 6y ago
      I don't see the relevance of that article, that is a known side effect of dengue immunity and has nothing to do with the vaccine itself.
      - beagle3 6y ago
        It’s a known side effect of dengue immunity acquired through getting infected with it. The vaccine was approved hastily and without addressing this concern - it is not “a known side effect of dengue immunity” but a side effect of prior infection, avoiding which was the whole point of the vaccine. There is no reason to believe that SarsCOV2 infection has a similar problem (ADE) or causes a similar long term issue - but it is too new to be sure. And if it does have an ADE issue (or similar) it is possible the vaccine will trigger it like the virus (as happened with this particular dengue vaccine, but which can potentially not be an issue with a different vaccine) And it’s also possible that the antibodies matching the protein chosen will attack another similar protein in the body with some people - and will cause an autoimmune condition. It is unlikely, but possible. That’s why vaccine safety profiles are usually tested for years before approval for general population. These vaccines have had exactly 2 months wide scale safety evaluation. I am very hopeful they will turn out safe; but our knowledge of their safety profile is very far from our usual level at the time vaccines are approved, especially with respect to long term safety.
  - DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
    Developing SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates was not the difficult part. Within weeks of the genetic sequence of the virus being sequenced, several existing techniques (inactivated whole virion, mRNA, adenovirus vector, to name a few) were rapidly applied to develop vaccine candidates. These techniques range from extremely old-fashioned (inactivated whole virion) to brand new (mRNA). The thing that was sped up was the entire clinical trial schedule (not the "Sci-Fi" part). Clinical trials are costly, so private companies would normally proceed cautiously. They would take longer on the pre-clinical trials (e.g., animal trials), and take longer to evaluate the results before beginning Phase-I trials. They would wait for Phase-I trials to finish before deciding whether to proceed to Phase-II trials. They would again wait before proceeding to Phase-III trials. But this time, various governments were providing guarantees and financial backstops, so companies could begin Phase-II and Phase-III trials before Phase-I trials were complete. Just to illustrate this, Moderna's Phase-I trial is still not complete, and will not be finished until November 2021.[1] Yet Moderna began its Phase-III trial in July 2020,[2] as soon as it had enough safety data from Phase-I and II trials to do so. Long story short, the main speed-up came from removing all financial considerations from development, not from Sci-Fi advances in vaccine development (though Moderna and Biontech's vaccines are using new techniques). In some sense, we were lucky that SARS-CoV-2 is not particularly difficult to develop vaccines against. A wide range of techniques now appear to have decent results. Influenza is a much more difficult virus to develop vaccines against, because of some of its special properties (reassortment of the 8 sections of its genome, much faster mutation rate). 1. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461 2. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427
  - astura 6y ago
    Vaccines themselves are established tech, getting one to the market that fast requires a massive amount of money and a massive amount of political will. We had both.
- stronglikedan 6y ago
  It's only year 1. Still 9 more years for the sci-fi explosion (that I, like OP, think will happen).
im3w1l 6y ago
Reminds me of what Bill Gates said 2010. Crazy how prescient he was. > Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naèFvetè9 (sic) that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.” http://web.archive.org/web/20110814132419/http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_hackers/5/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110814132419/http://www.wired.c...

“Definitely” is a big word. Less than two months ago, another attempt at a universal flu vaccine failed in Phase 3 clinical trials [1] [1] https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-companys-bid-for-universal-flu-vaccine-fails-in-clinical-trails/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/israeli-companys-bid-for-unive...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
hannob 6y ago
We now have a vaccine where the time from sequencing the virus to the time vaccinating the first patient was less than a year. That already happened. By the standard of every expert I heard commenting on this that pretty much would've been considered scifi before 2020.
- lyse-ana 6y ago
  Not a domain expert, but it seems so: - https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/ https://www.ovg.ox.ac.uk/, "How to make a vaccine in record time" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDiyIKUP0M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddDiyIKUP0M - DeepMind effectively solving protein folding: AlphaFold https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488; https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25253488; the comment by 'dnautics in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306088 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25306088 seems to validate this. Not to mention the transition from IRL to cyberspace (physical distancing forcing employers to allow remote work; remote schooling; communities meeting online via e.g. Discord, Zoom)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aphextron 6y ago
  It's really hard to overstate what an advancement mRNA vaccines will be. MRNA-1273, the Moderna vaccine, was designed in two days. As horrible as this pandemic has been, we will probably see an equivalent in vaccine technology advances over the next couple years that we saw in weapons advancement from WWII. These things have the potential to treat/prevent cancer, eradicate the flu, deliver gene therapies, so many things that seemed like scifi just 10 years ago.
  - mxcrossb 6y ago
    The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? I think the real development time boost we saw here was that it was easy to get volunteers and easy to test effectiveness due to the huge number of cases.
    - aphextron 6y ago
      > The tech is great, but aren’t China and Russia deploying more standard replication deficient viruses as vaccines? The Sinovac and Sputnik vaccines are both less effective and have had serious adverse events in their trials. Sputnik hadn't even entered phase 3 trials and they rolled it out. The mRNA vaccines will be the first to pass the bar of FDA approval by a wide margin.
      - mxcrossb 6y ago
        Thank you for the information!
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Would new mRNA vaccines need to undergo stringent safety/efficacy testing as well? As I understand it, you make the bit of mRNA you want and stuff it onto the vector, which then deploys it into the cells. Once the technique is mature and well-understood, wouldn't it be much quicker to roll out vaccines for all sorts of things?
    - 6y ago
- beagle3 6y ago
  It is impressive and encouraging, but does not shorten the safety period. It may still come out in a year or two (or ten) that this increases the chance for some autoimmune disease in a problematic way, or causes some other problem. The vaccine was created quickly, but as far as I understand we are now better at evaluating safety yet -- the 3-10 years safety study would still have been practiced if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic. The result of not enough testing can be fatal, see e.g. [0] [0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/dengue-vaccine-fiasco-leads-criminal-charges-researcher-philippines https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/dengue-vaccine-fiasc...
  - CorrectHorseBat 6y ago
    I don't see the relevance of that article, that is a known side effect of dengue immunity and has nothing to do with the vaccine itself.
    - beagle3 6y ago
      It’s a known side effect of dengue immunity acquired through getting infected with it. The vaccine was approved hastily and without addressing this concern - it is not “a known side effect of dengue immunity” but a side effect of prior infection, avoiding which was the whole point of the vaccine. There is no reason to believe that SarsCOV2 infection has a similar problem (ADE) or causes a similar long term issue - but it is too new to be sure. And if it does have an ADE issue (or similar) it is possible the vaccine will trigger it like the virus (as happened with this particular dengue vaccine, but which can potentially not be an issue with a different vaccine) And it’s also possible that the antibodies matching the protein chosen will attack another similar protein in the body with some people - and will cause an autoimmune condition. It is unlikely, but possible. That’s why vaccine safety profiles are usually tested for years before approval for general population. These vaccines have had exactly 2 months wide scale safety evaluation. I am very hopeful they will turn out safe; but our knowledge of their safety profile is very far from our usual level at the time vaccines are approved, especially with respect to long term safety.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  Developing SARS-CoV-2 vaccine candidates was not the difficult part. Within weeks of the genetic sequence of the virus being sequenced, several existing techniques (inactivated whole virion, mRNA, adenovirus vector, to name a few) were rapidly applied to develop vaccine candidates. These techniques range from extremely old-fashioned (inactivated whole virion) to brand new (mRNA). The thing that was sped up was the entire clinical trial schedule (not the "Sci-Fi" part). Clinical trials are costly, so private companies would normally proceed cautiously. They would take longer on the pre-clinical trials (e.g., animal trials), and take longer to evaluate the results before beginning Phase-I trials. They would wait for Phase-I trials to finish before deciding whether to proceed to Phase-II trials. They would again wait before proceeding to Phase-III trials. But this time, various governments were providing guarantees and financial backstops, so companies could begin Phase-II and Phase-III trials before Phase-I trials were complete. Just to illustrate this, Moderna's Phase-I trial is still not complete, and will not be finished until November 2021.[1] Yet Moderna began its Phase-III trial in July 2020,[2] as soon as it had enough safety data from Phase-I and II trials to do so. Long story short, the main speed-up came from removing all financial considerations from development, not from Sci-Fi advances in vaccine development (though Moderna and Biontech's vaccines are using new techniques). In some sense, we were lucky that SARS-CoV-2 is not particularly difficult to develop vaccines against. A wide range of techniques now appear to have decent results. Influenza is a much more difficult virus to develop vaccines against, because of some of its special properties (reassortment of the 8 sections of its genome, much faster mutation rate). 1. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04283461 2. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427 https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04470427
- astura 6y ago
  Vaccines themselves are established tech, getting one to the market that fast requires a massive amount of money and a massive amount of political will. We had both.
stronglikedan 6y ago
It's only year 1. Still 9 more years for the sci-fi explosion (that I, like OP, think will happen).

im3w1l 6y ago

Reminds me of what Bill Gates said 2010. Crazy how prescient he was. > Just ask Bill Gates. If he were a teenager today, he says, he’d be hacking biology. “Creating artificial life with DNA synthesis. That’s sort of the equivalent of machine-language programming,” says Gates, whose work for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has led him to develop his own expertise in disease and immunology. “If you want to change the world in some big way, that’s where you should start — biological molecules.” Which is why the hacker spirit will endure, he says, even in an era when computers are so ubiquitous and easy to control. “There are more opportunities now,” he says. “But they’re different opportunities. They need the same type of crazy fanaticism of youthful genius and naèFvetè9 (sic) that drove the PC industry — and can have the same impact on the human condition.” http://web.archive.org/web/20110814132419/http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/04/ff_hackers/5/ http://web.archive.org/web/20110814132419/http://www.wired.c...