10 ms·

Nanoparticle vaccine protects against a spectrum of Covid-19-causing variants

91 points by danboarder 4y ago

throttledagain2 4y ago
swader999 4y ago
avalys 4y ago
Borg nanoprobes, anyone?
- benevol 4y ago
  - Nursie 4y ago
    You can say that about basically any industry. As such it's not a particularly interesting comment.
    - boffinAudio 4y ago
      What industry lies to the people it is supposed to be making healthier with their products, time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction? Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings? There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination.
      - Nursie 4y ago
        > What industry lies to the people it is supposed to be making healthier with their products, Many. > time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream Many. > that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction? Wait, are we talking tobacco? Coffee? Facebook? > Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings? Big pharma owns the newspapers now? > There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination. Fossil fuels, easily. Have there been bad actors, bad decisions, evil people? Yep, in every walk of life. Writing off entire industries because of it is myopic. Calling out pharma as worse than all others is just nonsense.
        boffinAudio 4y ago
        Big Pharma has ruined more lives for the sake of insane profit-making than almost any other industry, except perhaps the military industrial complex. >Big pharma owns the newspapers now? Why .. Yes, indeed .. haven't you been paying attention? https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/blackrock-vanguard-own-big-pharma-media/ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/blackrock-vangua...
        Nursie 4y ago
        "The Defender" is a quack site and that article is conspiracy theory bullcrap. You might want to get your 'news' somewhere else, and try to think a little more critically about where you pick up information. "Big Pharma" has issues, and could do with tighter regulation, especially in the USA. Other countries manage it. And none of that means we throw out good science and good medical products like vaccines.
        boffinAudio 4y ago
        Do you really think a criminal organization such as Pfizer doesn't have its own propaganda fund? This is a company that knowingly lied to its users about the efficacy and dangers of its drugs, and opted to cover it up and eventually pay a billion dollar fine, rather than actually address their failings. Blind faith in authoritarian institutions is not a good way to direct public health policy - especially when those institutions have a long and sordid track record of human rights abuses and outright criminal behaviour.
- b3lvedere 4y ago
  I must admit that was one of my first thoughts when i read the word nanoparticle. :)
warning26 4y ago
Note that this tech is similar to what's used by Novavax (and that HPV vaccine Gardasil); both use virus-like nanoparticles. The main innovation here appears to be the use of a variety of spike proteins instead of just one.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  As usual when the HPV vaccine is mentioned, I want to stress how important it is to get it, for anyone but those that absolutely do not have sex. HPV can cause warts and serious cancers in the mouth/throat, anus, penis and vaginal tract/cervix. Warts alone can be a severe mental and physical burden requiring several visits to a dermatologist and potentially extremely dangerous medicine like Imiquimod. The HPV vaccines protect against the most dangerous of the many known HPV strains. The HPV vaccines are even assumed to be a therapy for infection already present. Many people have at least a few HPV strains somewhere in their body. Almost everyone who engages in casual sex has them. HPV has been promoted primarily for women, to protect against cervical cancer, but men are also at risk: It can cause cancer at/in your penis, anus and throat! MSM (men having sex with men) are especially at risk.
  - Trouble_007 4y ago
    FYI; Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) Vaccines : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    Public health messaging has been excruciatingly slow here too, it's gradually being recommended more and more for males too in the last few years by public health agencies as an actual health intervention for males (previously the idea was more about reducing transmission to females). So yes, second this, everyone should get this vaccine, and it's probably not too late to get some benefit from it since there are multiple strains you can vaccinate against (you'll almost certainly have some strains if you're aged 20+ though). That said, for multiple reasons there's no real need to panic and rush out to get it if you're older and monogamous.
rastignack 4y ago
How long does the protection last ? Waning immunity is a thing with Covid, if I observe correctly.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Is there any information why this is the case for covid, but not some other vaccines? What makes all the Covid vaccines so very bad at their job? Is it just the mutation speed of covid? e.g. the pox vaccine some people received 50 years ago still seems to protect against monkeypox now and the HPV vaccine also seems to provide long lasting protection ("at least 10 years, probably more").
  - rob_c 4y ago
    Clue, look at the general behaviour of all virii within the similar genus. C19 is a new variety, but C-class virii are and have been well researched for decades. And almost every, single, time. C19 is behaving like a new C-class virus with some new symptoms such as a chesty cough and a risk of pneumonic like symptoms in those who have non perfect health. I.e. it's not been bioengineered to kill it be more or less contagious, or cause people to grow a 3rd arm.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      "Virii" is wrong. If it were a thing, it would be the plural of "virius", which isn't a word. "The Latin word "virus" isn't widely attested, and never in the plural. It seems to refer to something like a miasma - that is, a substance, that has no plural. The English word Virus, refering to a particle of an infectious agent, should therefore be treated as an English word, of which the plural form is "viruses". [Edit] There are singular nouns in Latin that end in "-us", which do have a plural form, but that plural form is spelled the same as the singular form. So it's possible that the plural of the Latin "virus" was "virus". But as far as I'm aware, it wasn't a countable noun. Also, if we want "virus" to mean a particle, then it's inconvenient for the plural to also be "virus" - we'd like a notation for referring to multiple particles. [Edit 2] It's worse, isn't it? We refer to the "Covid-19 virus", meaning the global population of that group of strains; the individual strains in the group might then also be referred to as a singular "virus", in the sense in which we might refer to urban air-pollution being caused by "the car". I gave up using words like "stadia" and "referenda" many years ago. I'm afraid I'm very pedantic about language, but I now think those are a sort of back-Latin, and they sound pretentious. "Stadium" and "referendum" are English words now, and the way normal people pluralise them is correct.
userbinator 4y ago
bawolff 4y ago
Its kind of confusing to me what the difference between this and a traditional vaccine is.
- Traubenfuchs 4y ago
  Traditional vaccines are either weaker versions of the same virus created through "breeding" in animals or other manipulations OR they are replication deficient viruses, that means they can only replicated in specialized lab cells, but not in our real, normal cells. Nanoparticle vaccines are less traditional in the sense that they do not contain a virus at all, but just particles that have the virus signature, to trick your immune system into building protection against the real virus, that has the same signature. mrna and vector vaccines are even less traditional: They literally infect your existing, healthy cells and turn them into factories for nanoparticles. Eventually those cells are killed. The amount of particles produced for those vaccines is indeterminate, potentially leading to heavier side effects ("reactions") and the death of the infected cells itself is also not healthy.
  - bawolff 4y ago
    By traditional i meant protein subunit vaccines.
- didibus 4y ago
  Traditional vaccines are inactivated viruses, you inject killed viruses which are thus inactive but might still allow the immune system to react and build immunity, though you often need an adjuvant to trigger a strong enough response. This is a protein based vaccine, some traditional vaccines also use this method, like the Hepatitis B vaccine, where basically you inject some of the protein from the virus instead of the whole virus as with the inactivated method. You can also combine multiple proteins into a nanoparticle as is done here. The idea of combining proteins from multiple various SARS into a nanoparticle is what's novel here. mRNA vaccines on the other hand are new with COVID-19, they are kind of similar to protein vaccines in that they end up producing proteins from the virus, except instead of injecting the proteins directly, we take a segment of the genetic code of the virus and we deliver that to some of our cells so that they produce the protein for us.
efitz 4y ago
This seems much more like a traditional vaccine than the MRNA vaccines. I hope that something comes of this.
- mgraczyk 4y ago
  It's different in that it is not a single virus, but a collection of proteins from multiple viruses. It can be engineered to illicit better immune response much more easily than a virus.
  - hobo_mark 4y ago
    *elicit, you would not want your vaccine to do illicit stuff after all.
rob74 4y ago
Any reason why the title contains "C19" and not "Covid-19"? I'm not familiar with C19, is that a widely used abbreviation?
- throwoutway 4y ago
  Looks like the submitter needed to save space
- ssl232 4y ago
  Could be referring to a standardised high current mains connector... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320#C19/C20_coupler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320#C19/C20_coupler
  - jansan 4y ago
    Could also be a yet to be announced very high-end Citroën car.
pabs3 4y ago
Seems like this approach is happening in multiple places, from last year: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experimental-vaccine-protects-against-multiple-coronaviruses https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experim...
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  Nature did a rundown similar efforts a few months ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-022-00074-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-022-00074-6 The US Army/Walter Reed effort was probably the one that got the most widespread media coverage.
rob_c 4y ago
As does the immune system. Can we _please_ finish opening restrictions and go back to fixing the economic damage that's been done that will be with us for the rest of our lives. Unlike the cough which went away months ago.
- hansword 4y ago
  Good friend of mine had covid in November. He is still coughing. Nothing went away.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - xkbarkar 4y ago
    Good friend of mine had influenza and is still coughing. Whats your point?
    - undersuit 4y ago
      Influenza vaccines are offered yearly in many developed countries. Also your friend could have had influenza yesterday for all we know, at least the person you replied to mentioned a time period for their friend's infection.
  - rob_c 4y ago
    Good friend of mine is now healthier than 2020, clearly covid magically also made him lose weight...
  - an9n 4y ago
    Of my neighbours, colleagues and family, those that took the vaccine are those that are also getting ill with covid over, and over again.
    - undersuit 4y ago
      You live in a country with a ~90% vaccination rate. Of course you see more vaccinated than unvaccinated get sick. How many of the people you are noticing getting Covid are dying between the two groups? How many of the unvaccinated are avoiding the vaccine for real or perceived health complications and have adjusted their behavior to avoid unnecessary exposure?
zeroth32 4y ago
Virus particles are naturally occurring in human body and are mostly harmless. This vaccine may work on lab mice in ultra sterile environment. But in normal dirty humans it may cause severe allergic reaction, cytokine storm and painful death.
- hansword 4y ago
  That is why we do stage I, stage II, and stage III trials before putting them to wider use.
  - zeroth32 4y ago
    - logicchains 4y ago
      Gotta give Trump some credit: he managed to cripple more opposition party supporters than any politician since the civil war.
    - kurupt213 4y ago
      Are you talking about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that was made using traditional (proven safe) technology? Nothing is without risk. They determined the risk/benefit ratio wasn’t worth it because the vaccine wasn’t very effective (especially compared to the mRNA vaccines)
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
timcavel 4y ago

91 points by danboarder 4y ago

throttledagain2 4y ago

swader999 4y ago

avalys 4y ago

Borg nanoprobes, anyone?

benevol 4y ago
- Nursie 4y ago
  You can say that about basically any industry. As such it's not a particularly interesting comment.
  - boffinAudio 4y ago
    What industry lies to the people it is supposed to be making healthier with their products, time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction? Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings? There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination.
    - Nursie 4y ago
      > What industry lies to the people it is supposed to be making healthier with their products, Many. > time and time again, covering up facts in order to protect a billion-dollar continuing revenue stream Many. > that is derived entirely on the principle of addiction? Wait, are we talking tobacco? Coffee? Facebook? > Tell me again which industries outright own the media groups reporting on their failings/not reporting on their failings? Big pharma owns the newspapers now? > There is nothing comparable to the Big Pharma's influence over Western society, by any stretch of the imagination. Fossil fuels, easily. Have there been bad actors, bad decisions, evil people? Yep, in every walk of life. Writing off entire industries because of it is myopic. Calling out pharma as worse than all others is just nonsense.
      - boffinAudio 4y ago
        Big Pharma has ruined more lives for the sake of insane profit-making than almost any other industry, except perhaps the military industrial complex. >Big pharma owns the newspapers now? Why .. Yes, indeed .. haven't you been paying attention? https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/blackrock-vanguard-own-big-pharma-media/ https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/blackrock-vangua...
        Nursie 4y ago
        "The Defender" is a quack site and that article is conspiracy theory bullcrap. You might want to get your 'news' somewhere else, and try to think a little more critically about where you pick up information. "Big Pharma" has issues, and could do with tighter regulation, especially in the USA. Other countries manage it. And none of that means we throw out good science and good medical products like vaccines.
        boffinAudio 4y ago
        Do you really think a criminal organization such as Pfizer doesn't have its own propaganda fund? This is a company that knowingly lied to its users about the efficacy and dangers of its drugs, and opted to cover it up and eventually pay a billion dollar fine, rather than actually address their failings. Blind faith in authoritarian institutions is not a good way to direct public health policy - especially when those institutions have a long and sordid track record of human rights abuses and outright criminal behaviour.
b3lvedere 4y ago
I must admit that was one of my first thoughts when i read the word nanoparticle. :)

warning26 4y ago

Note that this tech is similar to what's used by Novavax (and that HPV vaccine Gardasil); both use virus-like nanoparticles. The main innovation here appears to be the use of a variety of spike proteins instead of just one.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
As usual when the HPV vaccine is mentioned, I want to stress how important it is to get it, for anyone but those that absolutely do not have sex. HPV can cause warts and serious cancers in the mouth/throat, anus, penis and vaginal tract/cervix. Warts alone can be a severe mental and physical burden requiring several visits to a dermatologist and potentially extremely dangerous medicine like Imiquimod. The HPV vaccines protect against the most dangerous of the many known HPV strains. The HPV vaccines are even assumed to be a therapy for infection already present. Many people have at least a few HPV strains somewhere in their body. Almost everyone who engages in casual sex has them. HPV has been promoted primarily for women, to protect against cervical cancer, but men are also at risk: It can cause cancer at/in your penis, anus and throat! MSM (men having sex with men) are especially at risk.
- Trouble_007 4y ago
  FYI; Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) Vaccines : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Public health messaging has been excruciatingly slow here too, it's gradually being recommended more and more for males too in the last few years by public health agencies as an actual health intervention for males (previously the idea was more about reducing transmission to females). So yes, second this, everyone should get this vaccine, and it's probably not too late to get some benefit from it since there are multiple strains you can vaccinate against (you'll almost certainly have some strains if you're aged 20+ though). That said, for multiple reasons there's no real need to panic and rush out to get it if you're older and monogamous.

rastignack 4y ago

How long does the protection last ? Waning immunity is a thing with Covid, if I observe correctly.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Is there any information why this is the case for covid, but not some other vaccines? What makes all the Covid vaccines so very bad at their job? Is it just the mutation speed of covid? e.g. the pox vaccine some people received 50 years ago still seems to protect against monkeypox now and the HPV vaccine also seems to provide long lasting protection ("at least 10 years, probably more").
- rob_c 4y ago
  Clue, look at the general behaviour of all virii within the similar genus. C19 is a new variety, but C-class virii are and have been well researched for decades. And almost every, single, time. C19 is behaving like a new C-class virus with some new symptoms such as a chesty cough and a risk of pneumonic like symptoms in those who have non perfect health. I.e. it's not been bioengineered to kill it be more or less contagious, or cause people to grow a 3rd arm.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    "Virii" is wrong. If it were a thing, it would be the plural of "virius", which isn't a word. "The Latin word "virus" isn't widely attested, and never in the plural. It seems to refer to something like a miasma - that is, a substance, that has no plural. The English word Virus, refering to a particle of an infectious agent, should therefore be treated as an English word, of which the plural form is "viruses". [Edit] There are singular nouns in Latin that end in "-us", which do have a plural form, but that plural form is spelled the same as the singular form. So it's possible that the plural of the Latin "virus" was "virus". But as far as I'm aware, it wasn't a countable noun. Also, if we want "virus" to mean a particle, then it's inconvenient for the plural to also be "virus" - we'd like a notation for referring to multiple particles. [Edit 2] It's worse, isn't it? We refer to the "Covid-19 virus", meaning the global population of that group of strains; the individual strains in the group might then also be referred to as a singular "virus", in the sense in which we might refer to urban air-pollution being caused by "the car". I gave up using words like "stadia" and "referenda" many years ago. I'm afraid I'm very pedantic about language, but I now think those are a sort of back-Latin, and they sound pretentious. "Stadium" and "referendum" are English words now, and the way normal people pluralise them is correct.

userbinator 4y ago

bawolff 4y ago

Its kind of confusing to me what the difference between this and a traditional vaccine is.

Traubenfuchs 4y ago
Traditional vaccines are either weaker versions of the same virus created through "breeding" in animals or other manipulations OR they are replication deficient viruses, that means they can only replicated in specialized lab cells, but not in our real, normal cells. Nanoparticle vaccines are less traditional in the sense that they do not contain a virus at all, but just particles that have the virus signature, to trick your immune system into building protection against the real virus, that has the same signature. mrna and vector vaccines are even less traditional: They literally infect your existing, healthy cells and turn them into factories for nanoparticles. Eventually those cells are killed. The amount of particles produced for those vaccines is indeterminate, potentially leading to heavier side effects ("reactions") and the death of the infected cells itself is also not healthy.
- bawolff 4y ago
  By traditional i meant protein subunit vaccines.
didibus 4y ago
Traditional vaccines are inactivated viruses, you inject killed viruses which are thus inactive but might still allow the immune system to react and build immunity, though you often need an adjuvant to trigger a strong enough response. This is a protein based vaccine, some traditional vaccines also use this method, like the Hepatitis B vaccine, where basically you inject some of the protein from the virus instead of the whole virus as with the inactivated method. You can also combine multiple proteins into a nanoparticle as is done here. The idea of combining proteins from multiple various SARS into a nanoparticle is what's novel here. mRNA vaccines on the other hand are new with COVID-19, they are kind of similar to protein vaccines in that they end up producing proteins from the virus, except instead of injecting the proteins directly, we take a segment of the genetic code of the virus and we deliver that to some of our cells so that they produce the protein for us.

efitz 4y ago

This seems much more like a traditional vaccine than the MRNA vaccines. I hope that something comes of this.

mgraczyk 4y ago
It's different in that it is not a single virus, but a collection of proteins from multiple viruses. It can be engineered to illicit better immune response much more easily than a virus.
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  *elicit, you would not want your vaccine to do illicit stuff after all.

rob74 4y ago

Any reason why the title contains "C19" and not "Covid-19"? I'm not familiar with C19, is that a widely used abbreviation?

throwoutway 4y ago
Looks like the submitter needed to save space
ssl232 4y ago
Could be referring to a standardised high current mains connector... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320#C19/C20_coupler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEC_60320#C19/C20_coupler
- jansan 4y ago
  Could also be a yet to be announced very high-end Citroën car.

pabs3 4y ago

Seems like this approach is happening in multiple places, from last year: https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experimental-vaccine-protects-against-multiple-coronaviruses https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/experim...

GeekyBear 4y ago
Nature did a rundown similar efforts a few months ago. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-022-00074-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41573-022-00074-6 The US Army/Walter Reed effort was probably the one that got the most widespread media coverage.

rob_c 4y ago

As does the immune system. Can we _please_ finish opening restrictions and go back to fixing the economic damage that's been done that will be with us for the rest of our lives. Unlike the cough which went away months ago.

hansword 4y ago
Good friend of mine had covid in November. He is still coughing. Nothing went away.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- xkbarkar 4y ago
  Good friend of mine had influenza and is still coughing. Whats your point?
  - undersuit 4y ago
    Influenza vaccines are offered yearly in many developed countries. Also your friend could have had influenza yesterday for all we know, at least the person you replied to mentioned a time period for their friend's infection.
- rob_c 4y ago
  Good friend of mine is now healthier than 2020, clearly covid magically also made him lose weight...
- an9n 4y ago
  Of my neighbours, colleagues and family, those that took the vaccine are those that are also getting ill with covid over, and over again.
  - undersuit 4y ago
    You live in a country with a ~90% vaccination rate. Of course you see more vaccinated than unvaccinated get sick. How many of the people you are noticing getting Covid are dying between the two groups? How many of the unvaccinated are avoiding the vaccine for real or perceived health complications and have adjusted their behavior to avoid unnecessary exposure?

zeroth32 4y ago

Virus particles are naturally occurring in human body and are mostly harmless. This vaccine may work on lab mice in ultra sterile environment. But in normal dirty humans it may cause severe allergic reaction, cytokine storm and painful death.

hansword 4y ago
That is why we do stage I, stage II, and stage III trials before putting them to wider use.
- zeroth32 4y ago
  - logicchains 4y ago
    Gotta give Trump some credit: he managed to cripple more opposition party supporters than any politician since the civil war.
  - kurupt213 4y ago
    Are you talking about the Johnson and Johnson vaccine that was made using traditional (proven safe) technology? Nothing is without risk. They determined the risk/benefit ratio wasn’t worth it because the vaccine wasn’t very effective (especially compared to the mRNA vaccines)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

timcavel 4y ago