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Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
- vibrio 6y ago"next target"? has been a target since inception. At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines, but I'm not giving much for these vaccines as proof of concept for scientific success in cancer or orphan disease gene therapy.
- jfengel 6y agoNow that it's been proven and the manufacturing scaled, there may be a fair bit of profit in it. If tuberculosis, MRSA, and even malaria can be targets, that would be world-changing. I'm not even sure how "cancer" is really a target -- are they talking about individualized treatments for your specific cancer cells?
- jl2718 6y agoThe process generally relies on discovery of potent neoantigens within the somatic mutations and then building mRNA to express it. So, yes, the idea is individualized treatment for cancer. I’m not sure there is any relevance for organism-scale immunity like TB/MRSA/malaria.
- odyssey7 6y agoIt makes sense to me now why this team was so well-positioned to quickly respond to the novel coronavirus. An individualized vaccine for cancer has to be created and administered fast, within the course of a specific patient’s cancer treatment.
- gww 6y agoI imagine that the tumour would quickly evolve to repress expression, mutate, or completely delete the targetted neoantigen as the neoantigen is probably not required for viability.
- jl2718 6y agoThis is absolutely true, and actually the mutations are usually quite diverse already, so it's thought that multiple neoantigens should be targeted simultaneously. However, no matter how much you target, the diversity and evolution of cancer always wins. Therefore, the goal is not to target every last cancer cell, but to trigger enough of an immune response across a wide enough variety of mutations for the B cells to adapt to whatever else they find. This is also the theory of checkpoint blockades, and they will probably be used together.
- gww 6y agoOh I get it that is clever.
- doggodaddo78 6y agoThat's what it sounds like. Possibly safer and simpler than viral immunoconological vectors. I guess the issue is identifying the very specific histological anomalies in cancer cells to target SARS-CoV-2-spikes style. Perhaps this can be done by flow cytometry and sequencing of healthy cells vs. cancer cells. The big challenge is making certain no other cells share the targeted structures.
- bryanlarsen 6y ago> so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2 Or more accurately, until Bill Gates invested and retargeted them at vaccines. These investments predated Covid19 and were in 2015 and 2019.
- thepangolino 6y agoI’m pretty sure the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines are based on mRNA vaccine research for the original SARS virus. The only reason that one wasn’t finalised is that the epidemic sort of died out on its own.
- bryanlarsen 6y agoWhich is why Bill Gates gave them money to continue that work. IIRC it only took them about 3 weeks to create the vaccine. To work that fast they had to have had a good base to work from, the infrastructure to do so, knowledge and experience.
- tpmx 6y agoThe Gates foundation granted money and invested, but not with that purpose. Moderna: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=modernatx https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=mod... 2016: "To develop a novel platform technologies for antibodies or vaccines to reduce HIV acquisition in developing countries" 2019: "To assess the feasibility of mRNA technology to deliver antibody combinations in selected neonates in low resource settings in order to reduce the impact of neonatal sepsis in this vulnerable population" BioNTech: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=biontech https://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/committed-grants?q=bio... 2020: "To development of a COVID-19 therapeutic approach" There was also a 2019 investment in BioNTech to develop an HIV vaccine.
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- xiphias2 6y agoThe time that mRNA vaccines will save compared to the effort people had to do to optimize data to fit in an adenovirus vaccine in itself can speed up science significantly. About 50-100 different sicknesses are being targeted right now (a lot of them in secret), so we can't know the biggest winners yet.
- ineedasername 6y agoIt's a large proof of concept on the safe use of mRNA. Sure, any given implementation might be harmful, but this is (so far) showing that it is not in itself a harmful process. And there'll be mountains of cash poured into mRNA research now, so if cancer treatment is a viable path, there's a reasonable chance of some success here. But it won't be a cure-all. We use "cancer" as if it were a single disease, but it's really a large group of different diseases with "unwanted cell replication" as the common factor.
- landemva 6y ago"proof of concept on the safe use of mRNA." Until about a year ago, potential treatments took 5-10 years of safety testing before general population use. This stuff takes time for things like antibody-dependent enhancement to be found. What we do know is those who are obese have bad outcomes to C19. I am not obese, got it a couple months ago, and recovered with just home rest. Now I test positive for the antibodies.
- hilbertseries 6y agoGonna need a citation on ADE taking time to discover. It’s typically caught in trials and we can run trials much faster during a pandemic.
- markus92 6y agoTypically caught in animal trials even, and surely something that would've been caught already with the amount of people already vaccinated.
- ineedasername 6y agoWhat we do know is those who are obese have bad outcomes That is such a blatant over simplification that it comes right up to the border of trolling, perhaps a bit over that border. It is incorrect on a level that practically defies any potential for a response due both to the impracticality of detailing here just how wrong it is, and the fact that a person who makes that sort of comment is unlikely to respond to anything argument that contradicts such a simplistic view of things. I'll at least address your reference to ADE by pointing out there might be a theoretical possibility there, things have worked out just fine in other illnesses even when know it can be an issue in-- for example-- measles, and yet a vaccine still knocked that out of general circulation a while ago until falsified research helped spark the anti-vaxxer movement and it gradually crept back in to un-vaccinated pockets of the population. Further, ERD simply does not take 5-10 years to detect. Congratulations on not being obese, and surviving Covid, but no one is debating the fact that most people don't die from it, so you've missed the mark significantly by using your own experience to justify your simplified view of the situation.
- sam86pa 6y agoThis will be another tool next to radiation and chemotherapy to fight cancer; it won't be a cancer cure. The problem is that every tumor is different. If the idea is to create a vaccine that attacks the tumor, it can be faster and easier with mRNA to develop an individualized vaccine.
- JediPig 6y agoI would first want it to work without side effects and give it time to study. The vaccine is less effective than sputnik vaccine. Given a choice, I would take sputnik 100 times over.
- monocasa 6y agoI don't quite follow. The whole shtick with problem cancers is that your immune system is ignoring them for whatever reason. mRNA vaccines work by priming the immune system for something it would attack anyway, but under safer circumstances since there's no real virus in the vaccine. What can the mRNA create that the immune system will train on given that the immune system isn't attacking the real thing to begin with? (And to be clear, this obviously is a piece I'm missing rather than a hole I'm trying to punch in their work. They're way smarter than me and wouldn't be working on this unless they had a clear idea)
- Slimbo 6y agoMy very basic understanding is you customise the mRNA payload towards the immune system targetting the mutating cells that have caused cancer in a patient (after the cancer material has been surgically removed). This prevents the cancer from re-occuring.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 6y agoI believe the advantage of the mRNA method is that it’s somewhat generic: you can stick any (protein-coding) RNA fragment into it, and it will be expressed in the body and picked up as a target by the immune system if it has any potential for the latter (I. e. isn’t something that’s ubiquitous in the body already) As such, it is faster to get from idea to vaccine. Recent history is an example already, but the cycle will be improved dramatically considering the technology is very much still in infancy. It’s also cheaper, to the point that producing ten doses of ten different vaccines may not be more expensive than producing a hundred doses of a single vaccine. This will be helpful against “cancer” which is closer to an unlimited number of different diseases than a single target.
- AngryData 6y agoWhat? That is like saying your next target after repairing your Corolla is the US economy.
- miklosme 6y ago> The vaccine (...) uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. I love how this technology turns a medical challenges into a software problem. Being able to code medicine will open up an affordable way to personalized drugs, instead of the current day "one size fits all" solutions. What a time to be alive!
- dragontamer 6y agoI mean, in theory that's possible. But in practice: personalized medicine is impossible to tests. We rely upon giving tens of thousands of volunteers medicine ahead-of-time to prove if medicine is safe. While the technology theoretically exists to make and distribute personalized medicine, the ethics and safety questions of doing so remain unanswered.
- ghc 6y agoPersonalized medicine has been tested for years in clinical trials. Trials require tens -- not tens-of-thousands -- of volunteers. Personalized therapies are being used to treat cancer patients right now, and using machine learning to find the right binding site for a particular patient's tumor should present no more ethical questions than giving them NSAIDs.
- amelius 6y agoUhm yeah, but it also opens up ways for hackers to code all sorts of biological stuff and put it in our bodies. All from behind their keyboards. Imagine "if dna.get_race() == $RACE then kill();" Or how about some biological ransomware?
- dragontamer 6y agoThat's really not how mRNA works. If DNA is the source code of our body, then mRNA is the machine code that exists in L1-instruction cache. (There's another process out there that copies DNA into more readily processable RNA) The way any of this mRNA stuff works is by throwing instructions into our body to create certain proteins in certain configurations. For COVID19, the vaccine is... as XKCD-put it... a set of blueprints to build a "fake death star" without any weapons activated. https://xkcd.com/2425/ https://xkcd.com/2425/ ------------ mRNA further has a "innate safety" mechanism, in that it degenerates. That's why our body uses DNA after all: because DNA does not degenerate, even though RNA is what's actually executing so to speak. So any mRNA medicine will have to be strictly temporary, and get its job done in a limited timeframe. The COVID19 virus gets around this fact by self-replicating. The instructions that our cells execute are to create a new COVID19 virus. The original "quine", COVID19 (and all viruses) "print themselves" as part of their execution. ------------- The "vaccine" is a set of blueprints for the COVID19 "spike protein" (and ONLY the spike-protein). Since it is missing all the other parts of COVID19, it cannot self-replicate. Our body then gets trained on recognizing the COVID19 spike protein, and is ready when the real thing attacks our body.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoIt was done before when they used a inactivated HIV virus to cure a child with leukemia by reprogramming her T cells. She was in the terminal stage of disease so hence the approval of the experimental treatment , we don't know the long term effects or why it did not work consistently in other patients.
- oliv__ 6y agoThis is way too smart for me.
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- someperson 6y agoAccessible and reasonably good NYT article: https://archive.md/5nWok https://archive.md/5nWok (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/health/a-breakthrough-against-leukemia-using-altered-t-cells.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/health/a-breakthrough-aga...) And as of 2019, the patient is still cancer free: https://emilywhiteheadfoundation.org/news/celebrating-7-years-cancer-free-2/ https://emilywhiteheadfoundation.org/news/celebrating-7-year...
- dataflow 6y agoA bit off-topic, but any idea how much it costs to get an experimental treatment like this?
- someperson 6y agoThe NYT article I linked to actually has two pages. The second page goes into more details on cost. Here's a direct link to both pages of the article: https://archive.md/Fwyo0 https://archive.md/Fwyo0 Here's the relevant quote: > The Pennsylvania researchers said they were surprised to find any big drug company interested in their work, because a new batch of T-cells must be created for each patient — a far cry from the familiar commercial strategy of developing products like Viagra or cholesterol medicines, in which millions of people take the same drug. > But Mr. Hoppenot said Novartis was taking a different path with cancer drugs, looking for treatments that would have a big, unmistakable impact on a small number of patients. Such home-run drugs can be approved more quickly and efficiently, he said, with smaller studies than are needed for drugs with less obvious benefits. > “The economic model is totally acceptable,” Mr. Hoppenot said. > But such drugs tend to be extremely expensive. A prime example is the Novartis drug Gleevec, which won rapid approval in 2001 for use against certain types of leukemia and gastrointestinal tumors. It can cost more than $5,000 a month, depending on the dosage. > Dr. June said that producing engineered T-cells costs about $20,000 per patient — far less than the cost of a bone-marrow transplant. Scaling up the procedure should make it even less expensive, he said, but he added, “Our costs do not include any profit margin, facility depreciation costs or other clinical care costs, and other research costs.”
- chiefalchemist 6y ago> The scientist who won the race to deliver the first widely used coronavirus vaccine says people can rest assured the shots are safe, Ok. But did anyone expect her to say anything else? This is obviously a (slightly?) veiled pitch for backers, more funding, and perhaps some regulatory freedom. It's unfortunate that the media can't resist the temptation to pitch this as news. It's not. It's interesting. There's certainly intrigue at 50k ft. But you don't ask the cow, "What do you think of milk?" Promise and hope should be tempered with context. We've been to this rodeo before.
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- ergljlkegrwlj 6y agoCovid "scientists" are quacks and conspiracy theorists. Why don't you all go back to your fake moon landings and flat earth theories - leave the rest of us alone.
- thelazydogsback 6y agoAnyone more knowledgeable than myself following any of the research saying that the mRNA vaccines can be dangerous due to over/mis-expression, such as: https://carterheavyindustries.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/covid19-rna-based-vaccines-and-the-risk-of-prion-disease-1503.pdf https://carterheavyindustries.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/co...
- capnkap 6y agoI'm not certain that anyone should be taking a "scientific paper" seriously that concludes with: > Many have raised the warning that the current epidemic of COVID-19 is actually the result of an bioweapons attack released in part by individuals in the United States government Also, a bit about the author: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bart_Classen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Bart_Classen
- thelazydogsback 6y agoYeah. I couldn't find the other articles I was looking for. His US bioweapon theory is pretty silly. As for "anti-vaxers", though I don't count myself as one or probably agree politically with most of them, I'm going withhold complete judgment there - vaccines are obviously effective, but until there are actually epidemiologically valid multi-generational meta-studies with as many confounding factors as as possible removed (probably requiring placebos be given to a percentage of people) I'm not sure we can separate vaccines from other relatively novel environmental or behavioral factors that may lead to certain diseases, esp. developmental/neurological conditions. I now have a bit less knee-jerk anti-anti-vax attitude after sitting at a table with several doctors who admitted they didn't/wouldn't follow all vaccine protocols with their own children - but I know this is certainly not scientific evidence. But I'll certainly be getting the COVID vaccine when I'm eligible...
- vixen99 6y agoHere's one response to this paper. https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/can-mrna-based-covid-19- https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/can-mrna-based-covid-19- vaccines-cause-prion-disease/ It concludes (regarding the claim) that "mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines can cause prion disease leading to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s dementia. What are prions, and can these vaccines cause prion disease? (Spoiler alert: The answer to the second question is almost certainly no. It’s speculation based on highly implausible biology.)" Classen is correct in one respect at least: "the current RNA based SARS Cov-2 vaccine has been approved in the US on emergency order without long term safety testing." But I think we all know that and understand why.
- sn_master 6y agoAnyone else getting 'I am Legend' vibes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xY6Ffy_wE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xY6Ffy_wE
- rsyring 6y agoAbsolutely. When the vaccine was first announced, I immediately thought of the movie.
- sn_master 6y agoYeah, and the part about cancer in the article is almost identical to the movie's plot, where they used a measles vaccine to cure cancer. Edit: I am not anti-vaxxer, just talking about the movie.
- c6401 6y agoIDK they used measles virus in the movie, but in mRNA they don't use virus at all. They just use lipid nanoparticle with mRNA, it can't replicate. It just delivers mRNA to cells and the mRNA is used by the cells as a boilerplate to manufacture some proteins. In case of SARS-COV-2 vaccine it's spike (s-protein), not the virus itself, not lipid particle protein RNA, just RNA for the spike alone. RNA is not stable, for our human proteins we constantly manufacture new RNA from DNA. So basically we send command to manufacture some spike proteins so that our immune system can learn to recognize and neutralize the spikes. The movie parallel is just on the surface but in reality it works differently. I'm not saying that you shouldn't start packing your zombie-apocalypse backpack though.
- atlgator 6y agoI know that they've made HIV a chronic condition rather than a deadly disease, but I'd still like to see it eradicated with a vaccine. Same for herpes and viral hepatitis. I hope they tackle all those in due time.
- leksak 6y agoAnd HPV
- tecleandor 6y agoDoesn't HPV have already a (kind of expensive) vaccine? Some (girl)friends of mine have taken it at their own cost, of around usd$1000 (in Europe).
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- mcjkrw 6y agoYes there are, but it's only for the high risk sexually transmitted ones. There are some 100 strains of HPV, and there's no vaccine for the "common warts" you can get on hands, feet, knees. Although what's interesting is the getting a shot of a vaccine for STD HPV types can in some cases help body clear existing infection of common warts. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31369771/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31369771/
- d0mine 6y agoWhy would a corporation risk loosing customers by eradicating a disease? What would shareholders say? Is it even legal? "chronic condition" sounds like a guaranteed profit for many years. Curing/preventing disease is a bad business.
- vletal 6y agoWe need to stop tolerating these kind of tinfoil conspiration theories. It does not even make economical sense. If you are the first to come up with a cure for that disease you will make huge profit compare to the rest of the industry. Especially if the cure involves coming up with a vaccine or a personalized treatment. Thats like the sustainable subscription wet dream of software companies.
- a-dub 6y agoFrom poking around on the BioNTech website and their associated press releases and papers from people who work there, it seemed that their founding goal was to develop personalized gene therapies for cancer. (Do a biopsy, send it in, cook some mRNA, send back a shot...) My understanding is there was basically a "hey, we can repurpose our stuff for something really important" moment. Which they did, enabling them to produce a working shot with unbelievable speed. (I read somewhere that sequenced sars-cov2 genome to first vaccine shot was something like 48h for them)
- hilbertseries 6y agoThis leaves out the part where they were already working mRNA vaccines for other diseases, like influenza. They repurposed that work, much the same as moderna did to make their vaccine.
- XorNot 6y agoThat's still lightning fast by any measure. Being able to turn your tools to a new problem rapidly is a credit to you and the tools.
- wyxuan 6y agoCancer vaccines aren't unheard of or completely crazy - there's a Glioblastoma (GBM) cancer vaccine that's pretty far in development by Canadian bio VBI Vaccines that may see approval soon, upon completion of their phase 3.
- guruz 6y agoAnd the HPV vaccine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine "It is estimated that HPV vaccines may prevent 70% of cervical cancer, 80% of anal cancer, 60% of vaginal cancer, 40% of vulvar cancer, and show more than 90% efficacy in preventing HPV-positive oropharyngeal cancers."
- ac29 6y agoHPV is a bit different. Its not a vaccine against cancer, its a vaccine against a virus that happens to cause cancer sometimes.