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Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

357 points by Osiris30 6y ago

xiphias2 6y ago
Didn't Moderna already announce the seasonal flu vaccine programs on the research presentation day? Anyways, I really hope them to succeed, my mother didn't take the flu vaccine ,,because it's risky and not that useful anyways''. Moderna can make it much more efficient with less side effects, so I'm looking forward to it.
- deelowe 6y ago
  Vaccines are interesting, but I'm much more intrigued by what this may mean for future therapeutics if their methods work well moving forward.
  - Blahah 6y ago
    There are a lot of companies (including mine) that have been working on personalised, target, combinatorial, interfering, etc. RNA therapeutics for quite some time. The success of RNA vaccines in the last year has really opened up the potential for pharma partnerships to test and develop these kinds of things. They have built out the infrastructure and there's a broad confidence and awareness of the basic concepts that was previously largely missing. Pharma just really loves proteins. The next 5 years are going to be incredibly exciting - it has the potential to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with many kinds of disease.
    - pkaye 6y ago
      Can you name some of these companies or what to search form. I'm curious what things they are working on.
    - xiphias2 6y ago
      I thought that only Moderna and BioNTech have the licences for mRNA vaccines. Astrazeneca is working together with Moderna on respiratory diseases, which is interesting for me, as I have asthma.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Actually vaccines can be used for lots of therapies. One example is using personalized vaccines for creating immune reaction for cancer by sequencing the cancer DNA and comparing it with non-cancerous DNA.
    - deelowe 6y ago
      Sorry. Yes, this is exactly what I was referring to.
- bluGill 6y ago
  Yes, from the article you can see they have been working on this flu vaccine since 2019 - before covid. They haven't had as much money, so it takes longer.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    Yeah, I guess now they can get infinite amount of money, so what matters is the amount of money they can spend efficiently.
cogman10 6y ago
Really good news! Hopefully these get approved relatively quickly. I'm most excited about the seasonal flu vaccine. That could be a major game changer.
- mikeyouse 6y ago
  Yeah I agree - so much of the original downlplaying of Covid was along the lines of "Well, the flu kills 50,000 people per year and we don't take extraordinary measures" which is an insane line of thought for multiple reasons but not least because we just write off 50,000+ people per year without much of a stink.
  - xupybd 6y ago
    Don't they already have flu vaccines. I thought the issue was that they changed so rapidly the vaccines can't keep up?
    - mdasen 6y ago
      I think the idea is the mRNA vaccines are much faster to produce which makes it easier to keep up (but I could be wrong, this isn't my area of expertise).
    - mikeyouse 6y ago
      Yeah, it's very difficult to predict which are going to be the dominant strains so they take a best guess, include the several candidates that they expect to be most virulent that season and ship that as the "flu vaccine" that season. The hope is that with a much faster time from approval -> production, in theory we could reassess in October / December / February and vaccinate against the most virulent strains that are actually showing up in populations. There are reports that Moderna had a vaccine developed in two days once they received the sequence from researchers. If they or similar companies received "platform" approval to ship new vaccines with abbreviated testing, it could dramatically change how we vaccinate for the flu.
      - 6y ago
kylecordes 6y ago
(Caveat: amateur opinion based on mainstream broad understanding, not an actual scientist.) This is interesting, but so far a weak first step on flu. Each year experts stare at numbers and perhaps read some tea leaves to choose 4 strains to cover, often missing somewhat. The innovation I'd like to see: ignore the "choose 4" process, and instead aim to cover all known strains.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/innovative-universal-flu-vaccine-shows-promises-it-first-clinical-test https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/innovative-universal... (“Innovative universal flu vaccine shows promise in first clinical test”) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1118-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1118-7 (“A chimeric hemagglutinin-based universal influenza virus vaccine approach induces broad and long-lasting immunity in a randomized, placebo-controlled phase I trial”)
- wbl 6y ago
  Moderna has a much more flexible production process so should be more resistant to misses.
- soared 6y ago
  >amateur opinion based on mainstream broad understanding I don’t think experts are reading tea leaves and it’s pretty wild to claim that. There are literally billions of dollars at stake. To bring it bag to software, that’s like me claiming I think machine learning people are just using fancy excel formulas.
  - pinusc 6y ago
    I mean... it's a lot of excel formulas, but still basically excel formulas!
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - 6y ago
throwarayes 6y ago
Very cool! Also I’d hope to see Lyme in the mix. It’s so pervasive and creates all kinds of weird dietary and nervous system issues.
- elil17 6y ago
  We already have a Lyme disease vaccine. However, the manufacturer refuses to sell it for human use due to PR threats from conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, creating vaccines is only half the battle. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
  - cycrutchfield 6y ago
    It's very odd that dogs can get vaccinated for Lyme but not humans...
    - peteretep 6y ago
      We can also have dogs "put to sleep" but not people. You can also keep a dog on a leash. If a dog dies, there's no need for a coroner's report. It's not _that_ odd that human and dog medicine are held to different levels of testing and safety.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > We can also have dogs "put to sleep" but not people. It's not like this is without controversy; it's an active political battle.
        KraftKacke 6y ago
        I think this was rather implying we put down dogs, if they break too expensive to fix. The vaccine was probably grinding through loads of "pets" in development. Very different than "putting down" terminally ill people on their own choice and action. Tho, maybe similar to the eugenic endeavors of the past. I hope you're not implying that's what's in debate again.
dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
I am curious how a trial for the HIV vaccine will proceed in a world where PrEP is available.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  I didn't know about PrEP, but from what I've just read it has to be taken daily in order to be effective. A vaccine could be a safer method.
  - dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
    I agree it would be better in the end after it’s approved. I’m thinking about getting the ethics board to allow a trial where you have to give half of the participants a control (and the other half a possibly-ineffective vaccine), when a known-good alternative exists. The other reply has a solid point. Maybe you can find a country where it’s not possible to distribute daily PrEP, but is possible to vaccinate people and then test them for HIV monthly.
    - abiogenesis 6y ago
      True. On the other hand, the effectiveness of PrEP is thought to be as low as 74% among people who inject drugs. It might still be possible to find such people for trials. We should still see a statistically significant effect even if they are taking PrEP daily.
    - heavyset_go 6y ago
      They solved the ethics problem by offering trial participants PrEP for free for the duration of the trials. Some people who start the trial not taking PrEP will also continue the trial without taking the PrEP they're offered and educated about for free.
  - din-9 6y ago
    It does not have to be taken daily - https://www.iwantprepnow.co.uk/how-to-take-prep/ https://www.iwantprepnow.co.uk/how-to-take-prep/
hooloovoo_zoo 6y ago
Would it be easier to cover more flu strains with an mRNA vaccine? Could we shove like 100 in there?
- camhenlin 6y ago
  Sure, but who do you know that’s willing to get 100 flu shots in a year?
  - crx07 6y ago
    You can put more than one drug in a single shot. The MMR vaccine contains Mumpsvax, Attenuvax, and Meruvax to fight the mumps, measles, and rubella, respectively
  - CyanLite4 6y ago
    I think OP means one shot with a lot of strains in it.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    Not sure if this is a flippant response, but I believe the parent post meant 100 strains in one injection.
- e9 6y ago
  There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.
  - psandersen 6y ago
    I'd totally take that, assuming reasonable convenience and cost.
  - jkaplowitz 6y ago
    Interesting. What are the required timing of the six shots, the percentage effectiveness, and the duration of protection?
syntaxing 6y ago
Damn can you imagine? I never imagined that an HIV vaccine would be possible within my lifetime. Kind of reminds me of HepC. An older coworker told me how a friend killed himself back in the day for getting HepC from tainted blood (pretty much a death sentence at that time and it consumed him). But now it’s possible to CURE it and hopefully it’ll be the same for HIV soon. Fuck, science like this is amazing.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Just to be clear, a vaccine doesn't cure a disease. It prevents one from contracting it.
  - choeger 6y ago
    In case of HIV, though, it may also (partially) replace medication, considering that the virus is hiding from the immune system for a while.
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    Getting to the parent comment though it's amazing how far we've come in that we already do have virtually 100% affective prevention from medicine. PrEP and the knowledge that non-detectible = non-transmissible. I've been re-watching Queer as Folk which isn't that old and it's crazy how aged it feels because we've made so much progress over the last 10 years. BTW amazing show if anyone hasn't seen - wish you could get HD version with the original soundtrack.
    - valarauko 6y ago
      QAF (US) was amazing - got them on DVD, and was the only way I could watch them ~ 15 years ago. For what its worth, PrEP is not without its own costs. Besides the documented side effects, it also seems to rapidly accelerate cellular aging.
      - dillondoyle 6y ago
        I have the DVDs too. It's worth the lower quality just for the music. Some of the most powerful scenes are deeply tied to the nusic for me, dancing at prom, Brian's bowling, the first episode, so many more - the replacement 'music' they hacked together is horrible too... Wow i didn't know the cellular aging part thank you. Do you have anymore info? I'm on it (or was when I could actually be around humans ;( ) The biggest downside I know about is the cost. It's insane even though i have really great insurance. Gilead does reimburse but it takes like 6 weeks or more. A low income person can't be out almost 2k for that long. Medicade/care is also a pain especially those most at risk, IV users, etc. Hopefully I've heard it goes generic soon. I feel like we are 5-15 years away from being able to eradicate or relegate sadly to the developing world only.
a-dub 6y ago
biontech also just published a paper on how they're trying to tackle MS. mrna therapeutics are exciting stuff!
- ideamotor 6y ago
  I saw this right before I came here: "FANTASTIC NEWS—A potential vaccine for multiple sclerosis is now within sight on the horizon! And it’s an mRNA vaccine by BioNTech, maker of the Pfizer #COVID19 vaccine. Study in mice shows great promise for improving symptoms & stopping MS progression!" https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1348912741562667008 https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1348912741562667008
m3kw9 6y ago
The HIV one is interesting, I wonder what strategy they will use with that?
- m-ee 6y ago
  Some more detail in this article from July, they’re using mRNA to make the body produce virus like particles https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-cells-make-particles-look-hiv-shows-promising-efficacy-monkey https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-...
  - someperson 6y ago
    Any effective HIV vaccine would presumably cause false-positives to the HIV antibody tests. Recently an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate trial was halted due to participants developing antibodies to proteins in the vaccine that were taken from HIV genome, causing false-positive on a HIV test. [1] Such false-positives could easily be co-opted by anti-vaxxers especially in light of the the famous Soviet Union disinformation campaign "Operation INFEKTION" [2] that falsely suggested the HIV/AIDS is a man-made virus created by the United States to cause genocide of Africans. In rural Pakistan, health workers have been killed by villages who see the polio vaccine as a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. Global mandatory inoculations using a safe and effective HIV vaccine that causes false-positive results on HIV antibody tests would be a field day for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists everywhere. [1] https://www.livescience.com/australia-covid-19-vaccine-false-positive-hiv-tests.html https://www.livescience.com/australia-covid-19-vaccine-false... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
    - Guthur 6y ago
      And could you blame people for being paranoid when the CIA have used vaccine programs for various purposes in the past. Though they've apparently now stopped.
      - scoopertrooper 6y ago
vegetaone 6y ago
This is bad. They'll have us on vaccines every other month. Nobody wants this, least of all I. There's a very easy way to not get HIV. Regular vaccines are bad, mRNA are built to cull the herd. Who will you blame when you get problems 10 years down the road? You can't sue anyone, either.
gautamcgoel 6y ago
Any thoughts on whether MRNA is a good stock to buy? They seem to be killing it these days...
- scrollaway 6y ago
  My thoughts are you shouldn't buy stocks if your strategy is asking strangers on the internet for tips. If you want to gamble, just gamble, you don't need anyone's permission.
francilien 6y ago
BioNTech’s vaccine programs: https://investors.biontech.de/static-files/85900972-a1ba-4701-9380-16d50ef6c71a https://investors.biontech.de/static-files/85900972-a1ba-470...
deanclatworthy 6y ago
Can someone fill me in here. I have tried my best to read, and educate myself about these mRNA vaccines. But I have yet to see any conclusive evidence or proof that having the vaccine for COVID-19 prevents you from actually getting COVID-19. And i've seen many people debating this in the comments of other HN threads. It might mean you are asymptomatic, and _less_ likely to spread your symptoms - but it still means you can theoretically harbour the virus and spread it on to others (e.g. through kissing) So, the question is, given we already have medication which works well as treatment for those with HIV - what exactly will this vaccine do for HIV - if not stop the transmission? My understanding is HIV is primarily spread through sex and sharing of needles. A vaccination program won't stop that. Thanks in advance. I would love to read more about this.
- notJim 6y ago
  As I understand it, the reason we don't have that data about the COVID vaccines is that it's costly to check for it. It's much easier to measure symptomatic cases than it is to regularly test everyone in the study to confirm that they don't have an unsymptomatic case. I believe we do think the vaccines prevent COVID, but we just haven't confirmed that.
- Kliment 6y ago
  I'll try. I'm no expert but I read a lot about this and people keep asking me to explain it to them. First of all, there is no way to entirely prevent infections and transmission of something that replicates in poorly perfused (low blood flow in the area) upper airways. The immune system works by carrying stuff to infection sites via blood, and so you need enough blood at the place where the virus is before it can be attacked. That's why nobody is claiming total protection from infection and transmission. However, this is highly misleading - the number of replication cycles before immune response stops further spread is dramatically reduced in a vaccinated person, and therefore both their chances of developing disease, and their chances of passing it on, are severely diminished, and the window of transmission is shortened from days/weeks to hours. So yes, you can theoretically spread it, but once vaccinated you're about as effective at spreading it as a doorknob someone sneezed on, rather than being a walking virus manufacturing factory. Now, about HIV - HIV is extremely difficult to spread from a single contact (it's got very low virulence) and can be managed very well with treatment, making transmission effectively stop from people in state-of-the-art treatment. However, said treatment is expensive and inconvenient, and has risks of its own, and you need to use it all your life, and it's not available to many people, especially risk groups. By vaccinating people at risk, or large parts of the population, HIV could be eliminated, or dramatically reduced at least, saving the people who would get infected from a life of being medication-dependent, assuming they have access to treatment. So for HIV, a vaccination program won't stop needle sharing and unprotected sex, but will stop people getting even more severe consequences from that. There's a similar vaccination program for hepatitis which has shown excellent results.
credit_guy 6y ago
One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. This virus is really scary. Like the Coronavirus, it jumps to humans from bats. Unlike the Coronavirus, it is extremely lethal. In the last outbreak, in 2018 [1], the case fatality rate was 89%. Fortunately, there were only 19 cases (17 died). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_Kerala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_K...
- throw0101a 6y ago
  > One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. I just submitted about this: * https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-bats-could-cause-the-next-pandemic https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741798
- alexpetralia 6y ago
  Is my understanding correct that a virus so deadly would quickly peter out because it kills its hosts before it can spread?
  - roelschroeven 6y ago
    That's my understanding as well. The problem, though, is that the virus doesn't completely peter out because it survives in the bats. There is a possibility a mutation makes the virus less lethal, in which case it could cause much more problems when it jumps again from bat to human. Maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, maybe never. Disclaimer: I'm absolutely no expert. The above is only my best guess.
    - Triv888 6y ago
      It probably could also mutate in a way that it would be just as lethal, but with a longer incubation period.
      - baxtr 6y ago
elicash 6y ago
Sorry if this is a stupid question, and I'm sure this is very positive news. But one question I didn't find an answer to in the press release: what's the value of using mRNA for flu vaccine? Will it result in a safer or more effective vaccine? Be cheaper and easier to produce? Something else? I (mostly) understand the mRNA process, just curious about why it'd be superior.
- sleepydog 6y ago
  Well, most flu vaccines today are made by infecting fertilized eggs, so an mRNA vaccine would have the advantage of being vegan. It may eventually become cheaper to manufacture.
- tgv 6y ago
  From what I understand, it gives more control over the immune trigger. Perhaps it's possible to sequence a small part that's common to many flu viruses and administer that?
- Zeratoss 6y ago
  Not a stupid question You don't have to mess around with proteins. Producing a new protein and especially purifying it is a ton of work. mRNA is comparatively simple to produce
- pas 6y ago
  Safer, yes. (No interaction with the nucleus, very simple and straightforward conceptually, plus a few engineering tricks to make it amazingly effective: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... ) Cheaper, well, it depends. (Vaccines are already cheap, especially because they are mass produced.) But I'm guessing - but I'm a total layman - that Moderna is betting big on their mRNA platform. The "beauty" of it is that you really need to just copy-paste some part of the virus (pick protein from the viral genome), and literally just paste it into their vaccine deliver platform. (See the link.) And this means R&D costs could go waaaaay down. Sure, clinical trials are still needed to make sure it's safe and effective, but now they have a very good choice of nailing it on the first try, every try. (Basically unless they pick a wrong protein, it will work "every time". And it's already possible to get antibodies from folks who have "seroconverted" - that is they have become immune to something, because they have the antibodies against that thing. So, they sample a lot of people, look at what the human immune system did, and just pick the most common/stable protein target.) The flu virus is problematic because it evolves/mutates fast, so old antibodies might not fit the new proteins. Yeah, sounds crazy, but some (!) small mutations lead to still functioning but sufficiently different proteins. (Of course we don't really see all the mutations that led to non-functioning proteins.) It's also possible - super total speculation here - that the scientists/professionals/experts have a better guess on what to target than our immune system. (Relevant buzzwords: immunodominant / conserved epitope; epitope is the part of the target protein that the antibody/T-cell/B-cell actually matches/binds-to , and if the virus changes that part, boom, new virus, "doesn't look like anything to me", for example in case of HIV: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115730/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115730/ )
jszymborski 6y ago
Clearly Flu, HIV, and Nipah are more pressing, but I found myself wondering last night what the odds are of a rhinovirus vaccine being in the cards thanks to rapid progress SARS-CoV-2 has pressed us to make w.r.t. RNA and protein-like vaccines. Economics is the largest barrier in my mind. While my understanding is that these vaccines are less expensive to produce, it's hard to convince people to get the flu shot, let alone a common cold shot. What's more is that with hundreds of variants, it's efficacy would be hard to get right. That said, I'd gladly pay a heft amount yearly if it meant I had a >60% chance of not catching a cold that year.
lemonspat 6y ago
A few weeks ago, I looked for info on how the mRNA itself is produced/created in these vaccines, but couldn't find the answer. Does anyone know?
- valarauko 6y ago
  "Therapeutic mRNA is typically synthesized using in vitro transcription (IVT) with single-subunit polymerases (e.g., T7, T3, and SP6) using a DNA template to produce multiple copies of the coded mRNA. T7 RNA polymerase can incorporate chemically modified nucleotide triphosphates (NTP), particularly uridine modifications, which have been shown to maintain translational efficiency and alter the interactions between exogenous mRNA and TLR7, TLR8, and RIG-I (20)" * [Impact of mRNA chemistry and manufacturing process on innate immune activation | Science Advances](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz6893 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz6893)

357 points by Osiris30 6y ago

Didn't Moderna already announce the seasonal flu vaccine programs on the research presentation day? Anyways, I really hope them to succeed, my mother didn't take the flu vaccine ,,because it's risky and not that useful anyways''. Moderna can make it much more efficient with less side effects, so I'm looking forward to it.

deelowe 6y ago
Vaccines are interesting, but I'm much more intrigued by what this may mean for future therapeutics if their methods work well moving forward.
- Blahah 6y ago
  There are a lot of companies (including mine) that have been working on personalised, target, combinatorial, interfering, etc. RNA therapeutics for quite some time. The success of RNA vaccines in the last year has really opened up the potential for pharma partnerships to test and develop these kinds of things. They have built out the infrastructure and there's a broad confidence and awareness of the basic concepts that was previously largely missing. Pharma just really loves proteins. The next 5 years are going to be incredibly exciting - it has the potential to fundamentally change humanity's relationship with many kinds of disease.
  - pkaye 6y ago
    Can you name some of these companies or what to search form. I'm curious what things they are working on.
  - xiphias2 6y ago
    I thought that only Moderna and BioNTech have the licences for mRNA vaccines. Astrazeneca is working together with Moderna on respiratory diseases, which is interesting for me, as I have asthma.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Actually vaccines can be used for lots of therapies. One example is using personalized vaccines for creating immune reaction for cancer by sequencing the cancer DNA and comparing it with non-cancerous DNA.
  - deelowe 6y ago
    Sorry. Yes, this is exactly what I was referring to.
bluGill 6y ago
Yes, from the article you can see they have been working on this flu vaccine since 2019 - before covid. They haven't had as much money, so it takes longer.
- xiphias2 6y ago
  Yeah, I guess now they can get infinite amount of money, so what matters is the amount of money they can spend efficiently.

cogman10 6y ago

Really good news! Hopefully these get approved relatively quickly. I'm most excited about the seasonal flu vaccine. That could be a major game changer.

mikeyouse 6y ago
Yeah I agree - so much of the original downlplaying of Covid was along the lines of "Well, the flu kills 50,000 people per year and we don't take extraordinary measures" which is an insane line of thought for multiple reasons but not least because we just write off 50,000+ people per year without much of a stink.
- xupybd 6y ago
  Don't they already have flu vaccines. I thought the issue was that they changed so rapidly the vaccines can't keep up?
  - mdasen 6y ago
    I think the idea is the mRNA vaccines are much faster to produce which makes it easier to keep up (but I could be wrong, this isn't my area of expertise).
  - mikeyouse 6y ago
    Yeah, it's very difficult to predict which are going to be the dominant strains so they take a best guess, include the several candidates that they expect to be most virulent that season and ship that as the "flu vaccine" that season. The hope is that with a much faster time from approval -> production, in theory we could reassess in October / December / February and vaccinate against the most virulent strains that are actually showing up in populations. There are reports that Moderna had a vaccine developed in two days once they received the sequence from researchers. If they or similar companies received "platform" approval to ship new vaccines with abbreviated testing, it could dramatically change how we vaccinate for the flu.
    - 6y ago

kylecordes 6y ago

(Caveat: amateur opinion based on mainstream broad understanding, not an actual scientist.) This is interesting, but so far a weak first step on flu. Each year experts stare at numbers and perhaps read some tea leaves to choose 4 strains to cover, often missing somewhat. The innovation I'd like to see: ignore the "choose 4" process, and instead aim to cover all known strains.

toomuchtodo 6y ago
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/innovative-universal-flu-vaccine-shows-promises-it-first-clinical-test https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/innovative-universal... (“Innovative universal flu vaccine shows promise in first clinical test”) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1118-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-1118-7 (“A chimeric hemagglutinin-based universal influenza virus vaccine approach induces broad and long-lasting immunity in a randomized, placebo-controlled phase I trial”)
wbl 6y ago
Moderna has a much more flexible production process so should be more resistant to misses.
soared 6y ago
>amateur opinion based on mainstream broad understanding I don’t think experts are reading tea leaves and it’s pretty wild to claim that. There are literally billions of dollars at stake. To bring it bag to software, that’s like me claiming I think machine learning people are just using fancy excel formulas.
- pinusc 6y ago
  I mean... it's a lot of excel formulas, but still basically excel formulas!
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- 6y ago

throwarayes 6y ago

Very cool! Also I’d hope to see Lyme in the mix. It’s so pervasive and creates all kinds of weird dietary and nervous system issues.

elil17 6y ago
We already have a Lyme disease vaccine. However, the manufacturer refuses to sell it for human use due to PR threats from conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, creating vaccines is only half the battle. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/
- cycrutchfield 6y ago
  It's very odd that dogs can get vaccinated for Lyme but not humans...
  - peteretep 6y ago
    We can also have dogs "put to sleep" but not people. You can also keep a dog on a leash. If a dog dies, there's no need for a coroner's report. It's not _that_ odd that human and dog medicine are held to different levels of testing and safety.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > We can also have dogs "put to sleep" but not people. It's not like this is without controversy; it's an active political battle.
      - KraftKacke 6y ago
        I think this was rather implying we put down dogs, if they break too expensive to fix. The vaccine was probably grinding through loads of "pets" in development. Very different than "putting down" terminally ill people on their own choice and action. Tho, maybe similar to the eugenic endeavors of the past. I hope you're not implying that's what's in debate again.

dhnajsjdnd 6y ago

I am curious how a trial for the HIV vaccine will proceed in a world where PrEP is available.

abiogenesis 6y ago
I didn't know about PrEP, but from what I've just read it has to be taken daily in order to be effective. A vaccine could be a safer method.
- dhnajsjdnd 6y ago
  I agree it would be better in the end after it’s approved. I’m thinking about getting the ethics board to allow a trial where you have to give half of the participants a control (and the other half a possibly-ineffective vaccine), when a known-good alternative exists. The other reply has a solid point. Maybe you can find a country where it’s not possible to distribute daily PrEP, but is possible to vaccinate people and then test them for HIV monthly.
  - abiogenesis 6y ago
    True. On the other hand, the effectiveness of PrEP is thought to be as low as 74% among people who inject drugs. It might still be possible to find such people for trials. We should still see a statistically significant effect even if they are taking PrEP daily.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    They solved the ethics problem by offering trial participants PrEP for free for the duration of the trials. Some people who start the trial not taking PrEP will also continue the trial without taking the PrEP they're offered and educated about for free.
- din-9 6y ago
  It does not have to be taken daily - https://www.iwantprepnow.co.uk/how-to-take-prep/ https://www.iwantprepnow.co.uk/how-to-take-prep/

hooloovoo_zoo 6y ago

Would it be easier to cover more flu strains with an mRNA vaccine? Could we shove like 100 in there?

camhenlin 6y ago
Sure, but who do you know that’s willing to get 100 flu shots in a year?
- crx07 6y ago
  You can put more than one drug in a single shot. The MMR vaccine contains Mumpsvax, Attenuvax, and Meruvax to fight the mumps, measles, and rubella, respectively
- CyanLite4 6y ago
  I think OP means one shot with a lot of strains in it.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  Not sure if this is a flippant response, but I believe the parent post meant 100 strains in one injection.
e9 6y ago
There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.
- psandersen 6y ago
  I'd totally take that, assuming reasonable convenience and cost.
- jkaplowitz 6y ago
  Interesting. What are the required timing of the six shots, the percentage effectiveness, and the duration of protection?

syntaxing 6y ago

Damn can you imagine? I never imagined that an HIV vaccine would be possible within my lifetime. Kind of reminds me of HepC. An older coworker told me how a friend killed himself back in the day for getting HepC from tainted blood (pretty much a death sentence at that time and it consumed him). But now it’s possible to CURE it and hopefully it’ll be the same for HIV soon. Fuck, science like this is amazing.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
Just to be clear, a vaccine doesn't cure a disease. It prevents one from contracting it.
- choeger 6y ago
  In case of HIV, though, it may also (partially) replace medication, considering that the virus is hiding from the immune system for a while.
- dillondoyle 6y ago
  Getting to the parent comment though it's amazing how far we've come in that we already do have virtually 100% affective prevention from medicine. PrEP and the knowledge that non-detectible = non-transmissible. I've been re-watching Queer as Folk which isn't that old and it's crazy how aged it feels because we've made so much progress over the last 10 years. BTW amazing show if anyone hasn't seen - wish you could get HD version with the original soundtrack.
  - valarauko 6y ago
    QAF (US) was amazing - got them on DVD, and was the only way I could watch them ~ 15 years ago. For what its worth, PrEP is not without its own costs. Besides the documented side effects, it also seems to rapidly accelerate cellular aging.
    - dillondoyle 6y ago
      I have the DVDs too. It's worth the lower quality just for the music. Some of the most powerful scenes are deeply tied to the nusic for me, dancing at prom, Brian's bowling, the first episode, so many more - the replacement 'music' they hacked together is horrible too... Wow i didn't know the cellular aging part thank you. Do you have anymore info? I'm on it (or was when I could actually be around humans ;( ) The biggest downside I know about is the cost. It's insane even though i have really great insurance. Gilead does reimburse but it takes like 6 weeks or more. A low income person can't be out almost 2k for that long. Medicade/care is also a pain especially those most at risk, IV users, etc. Hopefully I've heard it goes generic soon. I feel like we are 5-15 years away from being able to eradicate or relegate sadly to the developing world only.

a-dub 6y ago

biontech also just published a paper on how they're trying to tackle MS. mrna therapeutics are exciting stuff!

ideamotor 6y ago
I saw this right before I came here: "FANTASTIC NEWS—A potential vaccine for multiple sclerosis is now within sight on the horizon! And it’s an mRNA vaccine by BioNTech, maker of the Pfizer #COVID19 vaccine. Study in mice shows great promise for improving symptoms & stopping MS progression!" https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1348912741562667008 https://twitter.com/DrEricDing/status/1348912741562667008

m3kw9 6y ago

The HIV one is interesting, I wonder what strategy they will use with that?

m-ee 6y ago
Some more detail in this article from July, they’re using mRNA to make the body produce virus like particles https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-cells-make-particles-look-hiv-shows-promising-efficacy-monkey https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-...
- someperson 6y ago
  Any effective HIV vaccine would presumably cause false-positives to the HIV antibody tests. Recently an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate trial was halted due to participants developing antibodies to proteins in the vaccine that were taken from HIV genome, causing false-positive on a HIV test. [1] Such false-positives could easily be co-opted by anti-vaxxers especially in light of the the famous Soviet Union disinformation campaign "Operation INFEKTION" [2] that falsely suggested the HIV/AIDS is a man-made virus created by the United States to cause genocide of Africans. In rural Pakistan, health workers have been killed by villages who see the polio vaccine as a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslims. Global mandatory inoculations using a safe and effective HIV vaccine that causes false-positive results on HIV antibody tests would be a field day for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists everywhere. [1] https://www.livescience.com/australia-covid-19-vaccine-false-positive-hiv-tests.html https://www.livescience.com/australia-covid-19-vaccine-false... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
  - Guthur 6y ago
    And could you blame people for being paranoid when the CIA have used vaccine programs for various purposes in the past. Though they've apparently now stopped.
    - scoopertrooper 6y ago

vegetaone 6y ago

This is bad. They'll have us on vaccines every other month. Nobody wants this, least of all I. There's a very easy way to not get HIV. Regular vaccines are bad, mRNA are built to cull the herd. Who will you blame when you get problems 10 years down the road? You can't sue anyone, either.

gautamcgoel 6y ago

Any thoughts on whether MRNA is a good stock to buy? They seem to be killing it these days...

scrollaway 6y ago
My thoughts are you shouldn't buy stocks if your strategy is asking strangers on the internet for tips. If you want to gamble, just gamble, you don't need anyone's permission.

francilien 6y ago

BioNTech’s vaccine programs: https://investors.biontech.de/static-files/85900972-a1ba-4701-9380-16d50ef6c71a https://investors.biontech.de/static-files/85900972-a1ba-470...

deanclatworthy 6y ago

Can someone fill me in here. I have tried my best to read, and educate myself about these mRNA vaccines. But I have yet to see any conclusive evidence or proof that having the vaccine for COVID-19 prevents you from actually getting COVID-19. And i've seen many people debating this in the comments of other HN threads. It might mean you are asymptomatic, and _less_ likely to spread your symptoms - but it still means you can theoretically harbour the virus and spread it on to others (e.g. through kissing) So, the question is, given we already have medication which works well as treatment for those with HIV - what exactly will this vaccine do for HIV - if not stop the transmission? My understanding is HIV is primarily spread through sex and sharing of needles. A vaccination program won't stop that. Thanks in advance. I would love to read more about this.

notJim 6y ago
As I understand it, the reason we don't have that data about the COVID vaccines is that it's costly to check for it. It's much easier to measure symptomatic cases than it is to regularly test everyone in the study to confirm that they don't have an unsymptomatic case. I believe we do think the vaccines prevent COVID, but we just haven't confirmed that.
Kliment 6y ago
I'll try. I'm no expert but I read a lot about this and people keep asking me to explain it to them. First of all, there is no way to entirely prevent infections and transmission of something that replicates in poorly perfused (low blood flow in the area) upper airways. The immune system works by carrying stuff to infection sites via blood, and so you need enough blood at the place where the virus is before it can be attacked. That's why nobody is claiming total protection from infection and transmission. However, this is highly misleading - the number of replication cycles before immune response stops further spread is dramatically reduced in a vaccinated person, and therefore both their chances of developing disease, and their chances of passing it on, are severely diminished, and the window of transmission is shortened from days/weeks to hours. So yes, you can theoretically spread it, but once vaccinated you're about as effective at spreading it as a doorknob someone sneezed on, rather than being a walking virus manufacturing factory. Now, about HIV - HIV is extremely difficult to spread from a single contact (it's got very low virulence) and can be managed very well with treatment, making transmission effectively stop from people in state-of-the-art treatment. However, said treatment is expensive and inconvenient, and has risks of its own, and you need to use it all your life, and it's not available to many people, especially risk groups. By vaccinating people at risk, or large parts of the population, HIV could be eliminated, or dramatically reduced at least, saving the people who would get infected from a life of being medication-dependent, assuming they have access to treatment. So for HIV, a vaccination program won't stop needle sharing and unprotected sex, but will stop people getting even more severe consequences from that. There's a similar vaccination program for hepatitis which has shown excellent results.

credit_guy 6y ago

One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. This virus is really scary. Like the Coronavirus, it jumps to humans from bats. Unlike the Coronavirus, it is extremely lethal. In the last outbreak, in 2018 [1], the case fatality rate was 89%. Fortunately, there were only 19 cases (17 died). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_Kerala https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_K...

throw0101a 6y ago
> One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. I just submitted about this: * https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-bats-could-cause-the-next-pandemic https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210106-nipah-virus-how-... * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741798 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25741798
alexpetralia 6y ago
Is my understanding correct that a virus so deadly would quickly peter out because it kills its hosts before it can spread?
- roelschroeven 6y ago
  That's my understanding as well. The problem, though, is that the virus doesn't completely peter out because it survives in the bats. There is a possibility a mutation makes the virus less lethal, in which case it could cause much more problems when it jumps again from bat to human. Maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, maybe never. Disclaimer: I'm absolutely no expert. The above is only my best guess.
  - Triv888 6y ago
    It probably could also mutate in a way that it would be just as lethal, but with a longer incubation period.
    - baxtr 6y ago

elicash 6y ago

Sorry if this is a stupid question, and I'm sure this is very positive news. But one question I didn't find an answer to in the press release: what's the value of using mRNA for flu vaccine? Will it result in a safer or more effective vaccine? Be cheaper and easier to produce? Something else? I (mostly) understand the mRNA process, just curious about why it'd be superior.

sleepydog 6y ago
Well, most flu vaccines today are made by infecting fertilized eggs, so an mRNA vaccine would have the advantage of being vegan. It may eventually become cheaper to manufacture.
tgv 6y ago
From what I understand, it gives more control over the immune trigger. Perhaps it's possible to sequence a small part that's common to many flu viruses and administer that?
Zeratoss 6y ago
Not a stupid question You don't have to mess around with proteins. Producing a new protein and especially purifying it is a ton of work. mRNA is comparatively simple to produce
pas 6y ago
Safer, yes. (No interaction with the nucleus, very simple and straightforward conceptually, plus a few engineering tricks to make it amazingly effective: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source... ) Cheaper, well, it depends. (Vaccines are already cheap, especially because they are mass produced.) But I'm guessing - but I'm a total layman - that Moderna is betting big on their mRNA platform. The "beauty" of it is that you really need to just copy-paste some part of the virus (pick protein from the viral genome), and literally just paste it into their vaccine deliver platform. (See the link.) And this means R&D costs could go waaaaay down. Sure, clinical trials are still needed to make sure it's safe and effective, but now they have a very good choice of nailing it on the first try, every try. (Basically unless they pick a wrong protein, it will work "every time". And it's already possible to get antibodies from folks who have "seroconverted" - that is they have become immune to something, because they have the antibodies against that thing. So, they sample a lot of people, look at what the human immune system did, and just pick the most common/stable protein target.) The flu virus is problematic because it evolves/mutates fast, so old antibodies might not fit the new proteins. Yeah, sounds crazy, but some (!) small mutations lead to still functioning but sufficiently different proteins. (Of course we don't really see all the mutations that led to non-functioning proteins.) It's also possible - super total speculation here - that the scientists/professionals/experts have a better guess on what to target than our immune system. (Relevant buzzwords: immunodominant / conserved epitope; epitope is the part of the target protein that the antibody/T-cell/B-cell actually matches/binds-to , and if the virus changes that part, boom, new virus, "doesn't look like anything to me", for example in case of HIV: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115730/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21115730/ )

jszymborski 6y ago

Clearly Flu, HIV, and Nipah are more pressing, but I found myself wondering last night what the odds are of a rhinovirus vaccine being in the cards thanks to rapid progress SARS-CoV-2 has pressed us to make w.r.t. RNA and protein-like vaccines. Economics is the largest barrier in my mind. While my understanding is that these vaccines are less expensive to produce, it's hard to convince people to get the flu shot, let alone a common cold shot. What's more is that with hundreds of variants, it's efficacy would be hard to get right. That said, I'd gladly pay a heft amount yearly if it meant I had a >60% chance of not catching a cold that year.

lemonspat 6y ago

A few weeks ago, I looked for info on how the mRNA itself is produced/created in these vaccines, but couldn't find the answer. Does anyone know?

valarauko 6y ago
"Therapeutic mRNA is typically synthesized using in vitro transcription (IVT) with single-subunit polymerases (e.g., T7, T3, and SP6) using a DNA template to produce multiple copies of the coded mRNA. T7 RNA polymerase can incorporate chemically modified nucleotide triphosphates (NTP), particularly uridine modifications, which have been shown to maintain translational efficiency and alter the interactions between exogenous mRNA and TLR7, TLR8, and RIG-I (20)" * [Impact of mRNA chemistry and manufacturing process on innate immune activation | Science Advances](https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz6893 https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/26/eaaz6893)