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mRNA Cancer Vaccine Reprograms Immune System to Tackle Glioblastoma in 48 Hours
- jmward01 2y agoWhen COVID hit one of the few positives was that a lot of people joined in cross-discipline research to address it. This type of treatment sounds amazing, and I know mRNA vaccines were in development for a long time before COVID, but I have to wonder if this research would have taken a lot longer to happen had COVID not happened. What other secondary impacts has the research into COVID had?
- Terr_ 2y agoThat reminds me of a piece about the "source code" of one of the mRNA vaccines [0], which had an amusing bit showcasing how one kind of pre-pandemic research was hugely important in preparing the necessary tools for when they were needed: > It turns out that, unmodified, freestanding Spike proteins collapse into a different structure. If injected as a vaccine, this would indeed cause our bodies to develop immunity... but only against the collapsed spike protein. > And the real SARS-CoV-2 shows up with the spiky Spike. The vaccine would not work very well in that case. > So what to do? In 2017 it was described how putting a double Proline substitution in just the right place would make the SARS-CoV-1 and MERS S proteins take up their ‘pre-fusion’ configuration, even without being part of the whole virus. This works because Proline is a very rigid amino acid. It acts as a kind of splint, stabilising the protein in the state we need to show to the immune system. > The people that discovered this should be walking around high-fiving themselves incessantly. Unbearable amounts of smugness should be emanating from them. And it would all be well deserved. [0] https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/ https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source...
- MarcoZavala 2y ago[dead]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- zer00eyz 2y agoMRNA's for aggressive cancers are going to do some amazing things. This is one example of "death sentence" cancer being stopped cold. To that end, the trade offs for MRNA's make complete sense. It's a great place to do long terms studies and see what happens down stream. What covid did prove out is that there IS risk. https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/advice-for-providers/clinical-guidance/tts https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/covid-19-vaccines/advice-... Biologics (what vaccines are) are weird. The FDA should be stepping back from restricting the use of these on INFORMED patients who have limited other choices and mandating the long term study that we need for this class of treatments. IF were extending peoples lives and finding those secondary a tertiary risks in patents who would have otherwise died we will all benefit in the long run. Between Pro and Anti vax camps it is dam near impossible to have a rational conversation about the topic. One more thing that has been polarized into the abyss... sigh!
- jijijijij 2y agoThe AstraZeneca vaccine mentioned in your link is not mRNA based.
- defrost 2y ago> What covid did prove out is that there IS risk. Not an mRNA vaccine and vaccine risk regardless of vaccine type was known and acknowledged for many decades before COVID.
- soco 2y agoWe had a nice discussion here, you had your arguments, got the few mistakes pointed out, all factual, civilized and nice. Nobody called you sheep, antiamerican, or puppet of the global government. So let's not bring the anti-vax "polarization" into this, because the two camps are simply not the same. Edit: I have yet to see such a rational discussion with an anti-vax. Won't say it cannot happen, but to me it's like bigfoot.
- happens 2y agoIf the were able to have that kind of discussion with you on the pros and cons of vaccines, would you still perceive them as antivax?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- _w1tm 2y ago> This type of treatment sounds amazing, and I know mRNA vaccines were in development for a long time before COVID, but I have to wonder if this research would have taken a lot longer to happen had COVID not happened. At least BioNTech was able to take the billions they made from pivoting into COVID vaccines and use the money to speed up their cancer-related pipelines. Running clinical studies is expensive and difficult to do if you have to beg for money for an unproven platform.
- jseliger 2y agoMRNA and personalized cancer vaccines are showing tremendous potential in a lot of cancers: https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-news-for-head-and-neck-cancer-patients-like-me/ https://jakeseliger.com/2024/04/12/moderna-mrna-4157-v90-new.... GBM is particularly gnarly; one of the few other treatments in trials I'm aware of is DCVax: https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/fda-approval-brain-cancer-alzheimers https://www.uclahealth.org/news/article/fda-approval-brain-c.... One big problem is the FDA's slowness regarding treatments for otherwise fatal diseases like GBM.
- pompino 2y ago>One big problem is the FDA's slowness regarding treatments for otherwise fatal diseases like GBM. What do you mean by slowness? They can't skip all the safety stuff!
- ndr 2y agoTrue for _all_ 'safety stuff.' However, safety requirements for late-stage patients with very few other options ought to differ from safety requirements for mass adoption.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- emblaegh 2y agoYou seem to imply that the only possible source of slowness if safety, which might not be the case (I've no idea).
- anonym29 2y ago[flagged]
- hazbot 2y agoWhen I got my AstraZeneca vaccine (in 2021?) I remember it was common knowledge that fatal blood clots were a side effect, and from the evidence at the time I estimated that the chances of it killing me were 1 in 500,000. Have those odds changed with new information?
- greenavocado 2y ago[flagged]
- add-sub-mul-div 2y agoMaybe employers wanted to weed out employees who are subject to emotion and ideology that keeps them from correctly assessing the relative risk levels between two options.
- greenavocado 2y agoMy body, my choice.
- hazbot 2y agoTrue. But the tricky thing is at what level of supermajority should companies be allowed to discriminate against you based on your choices with your body?
- umpalumpaaa 2y agoThat’s just not true. Several countries stopped using the vaccine until more data was available. For example in Germany. And then when the vaccine was used again it was only used on a subset of the population (older people because this risk was minimal in those cases). It was discussed at the highest level and all throughout the country.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- willis936 2y agoMy SO's PI died of Glioblastoma a few years ago, completely derailing their career path, halting all research, and leaving behind a grieving and struggling family. It's difficult to picture how my life would be different had this treatment been available.
- skeletal88 2y ago[flagged]
- jeffbee 2y ago> completely derailing their career path, halting all research That's a real odd way to characterize a person's death.
- AnarchismIsCool 2y agoRead the sentence again, more slowly this time.
- ianbutler 2y agoIt’s still odd to characterize a person’s death in terms of someone else’s career progression. Probably because it’s uncommon to see a death characterized by it’s second order effects. Usually it’s the family or friends and it’s more personal. OP didn’t say anything wrong though.
- arcticfox 2y ago> It’s still odd to characterize a person’s death in terms of someone else’s career progression. OP even went another level, since it was their SO's career progression that was affected, thus affecting OP. Agreed, they're not wrong, but it was odd.
- 4death4 2y agoThey’re not wrong in the sense they’re factually correct: OP’s life would have been different had a cure been available. But if OP’s SO approached her PI on their deathbed and said “Dear PI, what about my SO?” They’d probably be met with incredulity.
- ekianjo 2y ago> but the canine patients lived a median of 139 days, compared with a median survival of 30–60 days typical for dogs with the condition so you might get an improvement in overall survival but not a cure for GBM
- adamredwoods 2y agoIf any treatment can extend the life of a patient up to 3 times (as was in the canines), that's significant. Some treatments only have a response efficacy of a few months, but you add a few of these together in sequence, and you build a year.
- ekianjo 2y agostill does not change my conclusion. its a treatment, not a cure.
- iancmceachern 2y agoYet
- jmward01 2y agoI'm a bit more optimistic. The article specifically mentions that it is too soon to look at efficacy. There could have been a lot going on with these dogs that shortened their lives that was unrelated to the GBM. Optimizing the treatment for dosing, timing, etc and applying it sooner are likely to greatly improve its efficacy.
- notdonspaulding 2y agoGBM median survival for humans (according to the article) is 15 months. If the effect is linear, the boost to survival time in humans would be an additional 19 months. With the death sentence of GBM hanging over your future, an additional year-and-a-half is huge.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
- adamredwoods 2y agoSounds effective, I've always had a hunch the real path to controlling cancer is not a singular approach. Cancer mutates too much. >> “Instead of us injecting single particles, we’re injecting clusters of particles that are wrapping around each other like onions, like a bag full of onions,” said Elias Sayour, MD, PhD, a UF Health pediatric oncologist who pioneered the new vaccine. “And the reason we’ve done that in the context of cancer is these clusters alert the immune system in a much more profound way than single particles would.” Results from the canine trial showed how the vaccine reprogrammed the tumor microenvironment (TME) within days, allowing the activated immune system cells to fight the tumor. https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(24)00398-2 https://www.cell.com/cell/abstract/S0092-8674(24)00398-2
- loceng 2y ago[flagged]
- s1artibartfast 2y agoSure. My analysis is that they have yet to complete a human efficacy trial or provided any statistics.
- femto 2y agoRichard Scolyer, first patient for a Glioblastoma vaccine, is 10 months in and counting. (I'm not sure if it's mRNA based.) The treatment was vaccine, followed by surgery to remove the tumour, followed by more vaccine to prevent recurrence. The vaccine course is up to 8 out of 10 planned doses. So far it hasn't come back. https://www.facebook.com/ProfRScolyer https://www.facebook.com/ProfRScolyer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scolyer#Cancer_diagnosis_and_treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scolyer#Cancer_diagnos...
- DoesntMatter22 2y agoThTs pretty good because glioblastomas are real real bad
- joak 2y agoA friend of mine 23 years died of glioblastoma. Completely undetected, he went to bed with a mild headache and died during his sleep. If we find a cure for glioblastoma the challenge would be detection before it's too late.
- shitter 2y agoAnd they tell me my health anxiety is "irrational".
- DoesntMatter22 2y agoTo be honest that's not a bad way to go out. Better than years and years of treatment for something and a slow death. But yeah, the detection aspect would be interesting assuming these mRna viruses could cure cancer.
- egberts1 2y agoYes, I wholeheartedly agreed. This stance came shortly after I just buried my mother-in-law. Had been doing home-based hospice care for 3 (now deceased) parents of mine. Took 19-years solidly out of my life. So, yes. Quicker the better, at least for me.
- mlyle 2y agoGBM is horrible. At my first company, our VP of Sales, Luke Little, was one of my favorite people to hang with; I was still barely 20 and he was in his 40's but he had quite the mischievous twinkle in his eye and was willing to join us kids in tomfoolery and tell us about the world. We were acquired and got a great exit in July; he had a seizure driving the Cobra he bought to celebrate a few months later; he went downhill quickly and died within a couple of years. He had a young son, too.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- max_ 2y agoIs there a good book about cancer for a layman? That can help them understand what exactly the disease is, it's variants and a list of potential strategies to beat the disease.
- ggm 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies is a good overview of the history of radical surgery and chemotherapy, and the emergence of modern treatment to 2010
- otteromkram 2y agoWikipedia is usually a pretty good starting point. In addition to summarized content, reference links should be available.
- max_ 2y agoWikipedia is a rabbit hole. It seems too wide. I want someone that has already done comprehensive research to guide me on what I should be paying attention to.
- stenl 2y ago”The Emperor of all Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee is fantastic
- liquid_bluing 2y agoI found this book, which traces the surprisingly long and fascinating history of using immunotherapy to treat cancer up to the present day, well, fascinating: The Breakthrough: Immunotherapy and the Race to Cure Cancer - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakthrough:_Immunotherapy_and_the_Race_to_Cure_Cancer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Breakthrough:_Immunotherap... My uncle died of a glioblastoma, and shortly after I read this book, I was myself diagnosed with cancer (treated conventionally, hopefully cured). Immunotherapies like mRNA vaccines seem to be our best hope for finding reliable, permanent cures for a lot of different cancers. I am sorry that for many of our loved ones, a cure will have come too late.
- monkburger 2y agomRNA research is going to change medicine for the better.
- _heimdall 2y agoIt has that potential for sure, but I hope the people researching and developing these tools aren't that optimistic. We need to be skeptical until treatments are proven, going in optimistic for a field-changing breakthrough is a great way to misread the data or fail to design proper studies.
- howbadisthat 2y agoCancer tends to have an interesting relationship with cellular protein transport. And as a consequence has problems dealing with heat. The protein transport mechanism by which immune surveillance is conducted is shared with cells surviving heat increases via ejection of heat shock proteins. I once tried to find if there were any studies about incidence of cancer plotted against incidence of high fever in the same individuals but wasn't able to find anything. It may also point to the incidence of cancer actually rising due to suppression of other diseases. This is plausible due the fact that diseases are a constant in nature and therefore evolution would take their presence as a given as much as the seasons or the sun. It would be very unfortunate if numerous anti-cancer adaptions simply haven't evolved because regular fevers took care of those cancer precursors.
- setek16456 2y ago[dead]
- uyzstvqs 2y agoThis is an area where mRNA immunization can be very effective. I hope that this can be widely deployed in the next years, it can make a real difference. Something that also has great potential is the use of phages, that should definitely receive at least equal parallel research attention.
- mrtri 2y ago[dead]
- sharpshadow 2y ago“To generate each vaccine RNA was first extracted from each patient’s own surgically removed tumor…” Wait!? It can be any tumor right or do they have to open my skull and take a sample of the actual tumor they want to get rid of.
- pfdietz 2y agoI'm glad they're testing this. A vaccine approach always has the risk of hitting healthy tissue as well with the immune response. And when that tissue is brain tissue... Testing is necessary anyway to get insurance companies to pay for something. They like to deny coverage, and if the treatment is not proved to work that's an easy excuse.
- TheCleric 2y agoAs we see more and more promising therapies like this, that are essentially custom fit to the patient, it makes me all the more worried about the US health care systems. A treatment like this will be expensive, which in the long run means that we'll have a society where people with money won't have cancer (or at least will have a less deadly version), while the people without money will not. We'll be converting cancer to a problem of poverty. None of this is to say that we shouldn't pursue these advancements, but rather we should start thinking about how we can change our system to ensure that every member of our society has equal access to medicine.
- andsoitis 2y ago> We'll be converting cancer to a problem of poverty. Outcomes are already disparate. ” People in low- and middle-income counties in the United States are more likely to die of cancer than those who live in high-income counties. Eight factors, including lack of access to high-quality clinical care, food insecurity, smoking, and obesity may explain more than 80% of the relationship between poverty and disparities in cancer death rates at the county level, according to a new study.” And ” In low-income counties, the average cancer death rate in 2014 was 230 per 100,000 people, compared with 205 per 100,000 in middle-income counties and 186 per 100,000 in high-income counties.” —- https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2018/factors-linking-cancer-death-income-disparities https://www.cancer.gov/news-events/cancer-currents-blog/2018...
- xattt 2y agoIn Canada, despite free healthcare, some of this comes down to how much personal research you do and how hard you advocate in order to be treated at a high-skill facility. It is still an SES game, because higher levels of education (correlated with income) allows individuals to see beyond “well the doctor told me, so that’s what I’ll do”. Higher SES also comes with the ability for a more flexible work schedule, and the ability to travel to larger city centres where the high-skill care is more likely to be.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago>we should start thinking about how we can change our system to ensure that every member of our society has equal access to medicine. I dont think that is a healthy or reasonable goal, in the US or anywhere. Some care is labor intensive and costly, and simply not scalable to everyone. It is possible that time helps reduce the burden. The only way to have equal care is to eliminate high end care.
- MisterDizzy 2y agoThis seems to be a much better application of a gene therapy shot of this kind that has such a small targeted scope. A virus that mutates would clearly be an exercise in playing constant catch-up, but this seems a lot more realistic. Is there anything that works to replace the delivery system that's more reliable/predictable than the lipid-based carriers?
- MisterDizzy 2y agoI'm confused and the term vaccine. My understanding was that a vaccine contains a deactivated virus. Is mRNA not a form of gene therapy? I understand not wanting to spook people away getting the shot during an actual pandemic and altering terminology, but isn't this something other than a "vaccine"?
- Sammi 2y ago"A vaccine is a biological preparation that provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease.[1][2] The safety and effectiveness of vaccines has been widely studied and verified.[3][4] A vaccine typically contains an agent that resembles a disease-causing microorganism and is often made from weakened or killed forms of the microbe, its toxins, or one of its surface proteins. The agent stimulates the body's immune system to recognize the agent as a threat, destroy it, and recognize further and destroy any of the microorganisms associated with that agent that it may encounter in the future." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine Sounds like this is a vaccine given that criteria.
- MisterDizzy 2y agoAfter my COVID shot, I got 2 or 3 days of Transient Global Amnesia. It has scarred my son, who worries about amnesia every single time he's a little delirious from an illness or some such. By my estimation, the people who threatened and socially pressured others to get an unfinished, experimental gene therapy injection that was always socially enforced to be referred to in polite company as a "vaccine" are the ones liable for any damages that might occur. My son may be scared of random amnesia for the rest of his life. What does he get? What do I get? What do the people get who believed themselves to be above moral reproach specifically because they were afraid? How do we make sure such people never get to make a decision on my or my sons' behalf ever again? To say nothing of my cousin, a death of despair due to overblown lockdowns that did more damage than COVID. What do we do to make sure this doesn't happen again? The answer cannot be "nothing."
- kanbara 2y agoYour son probably needs therapy if he's this terrified of a non-life-threatening incident that is quite rare more than the incidence of death from covid-19. it was never about being afraid, it was about taking part in society and helping so that your son, young people, the elderly and immune compromised don't die. as for "experimental gene therapy injection", mRNA vaccines are vaccines and the mRNA in the vaccine does not alter genes, that's actual misinformation about how mRNA vaccines work.
- Sammi 2y agoThe article isn't about that vaccine.
- tjarrett 2y agoWow that sounds pretty scary. I'm sorry you and your family had to endure that. I'm also very sorry about your cousin. I share some of your concerns about using mRNA technology as an annual preventative solution against COVID and flu. Even though I'm triple Pfizer mRNA vaccinated I'd probably go for a non-mRNA solution going forward (my employer finally dropped their COVID vaccine requirement but maintain an annual flu vaccine requirement). But it seems to me that mRNA is a fantastic tool for fighting deadly cancers. Without treatment, the patient is absolutely going to die. I know. My mom died of glioblastoma back in September 2019. The tumor was wrapped around her thalamus so we had very limited treatment options -- at the time the most advanced treatments needed access to the tumor which is hard to do when it's in the center of your brain. Hang in there MisterDizzy and, since we are on Hacker News here, remember one of the principles of software development -- use the right tool for the right job. For me, right now, that looks like tried and true protein-based vaccines for those annual vaccinations and fancy mRNA platforms for those specialized treatments.