3 ms·
I hope this technology, if successful, doesn’t get stuck in the land of very expensive, exotic cancer therapies. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is nasty, and
by amluto 4y ago
I hope this technology, if successful, doesn’t get stuck in the land of very expensive, exotic cancer therapies. Epstein-Barr virus, for example, is nasty, and if you are over the age of 20 or so you probably have a latent EBV infection. A safe vaccine that could clear an existing EBV infection has the potential to prevent quite a large set of nasty conditions, cancer and otherwise. Think of it as something like the shingles vaccine, but a bigger deal.
It with also be interesting to see if the technologies used could lead to dramatically better vaccines for ordinary acute conditions. There is some evidence that people with pre-existing cellular immunity to intercellular antigens expressed very early in the lifecycle of a Covid-infected cell confers very strong immunity. The current vaccines don’t provide this sort of immunity, but the cancer vaccines are mostly targeting cellular immunity to intracellular antigens.
- ackbar03 4y agoA very expensive and exotic treatment is still better than no treatment I guess. At least we have a starting point of knowing that something works, other people can hopefully come along and cut the costs down. That being said, we still have cost problems even for not-so exotic treatments like bio-similars drugs (the generic equivalent for biologic drugs such as insulin). A lot of these drugs are off patent but still highly difficult and expensive to produce. Solving this bottleneck will be hugely beneficial to a lot of people