3 ms·
I am very not a biologist but I can't picture how this would work. Immunotherapy for food allergies, specifically peanuts, involves basically microdosing the al
by ianlevesque 5y ago
I am very not a biologist but I can't picture how this would work. Immunotherapy for food allergies, specifically peanuts, involves basically microdosing the allergen until the immune system chills out. mRNA wouldn't help there, even if you made a vaccine that exposed a peanut protein it'd have the opposite effect you were going for. If you took a different approach and expressed a protein that suppresses the immune response, then in just days when the mRNA degrades the effect would be lost. I'm sure we will get many miracles from mRNA tech but this doesn't seem like a likely one to me.
- suifbwish 5y agoThe mRNA would actually code for the protein (allergen) so they would not need to be injected. The main advantage of mRNA tech is that you can use the same device to create an limited number of inoculations by simply providing blueprints and letting your cells do the rest.
- hwbehrens 5y agoI am only moderately not a biologist, but this seems essentially correct -- vaccines are trying to address false negatives, but allergies are (in theory) caused by false positives. The mechanics of T cell training in the thymus for self/nonself discrimination are only partially understood, but any approach to rewrite antigen recognition would be (A) extremely risky, by potentially inducing massive autoimmune effects if anything went wrong, and (B) much more impactful for e.g. organ transplantation than allergic response.