8 ms·
Universal vaccine against respiratory infections and allergens
- snitzr 7mo agoGood news! Also, AI thumbnail defies all physical laws.
- ajma 7mo agoIn mice
- DerArzt 7mo agoGotta start somewhere!
- torgoguys 7mo agoI don't know much about this, but wouldn't the description of this imply you're stimulating the body to be in an a long-term situation that would be commonly viewed as unpleasant (inflamed, maybe nasal drainage, that type of thing) with the positive tradeoff that you get fewer actual infections?
- rzzzt 7mo agoMe neither, but I got something similar from the abstract that I was about to ask, so adding it here: "Following infection, vaccinated mice mounted rapid pathogen-specific T cell and antibody responses and formed ectopic lymphoid structures in the lung." That latter term (ectopic lymphoid structure) comes up in connection with persistent inflammation where the immune system sets up camp near the problem point. Is this good or bad? Do these go away once the infection clears up?
- dillydogg 7mo agoThese are pretty common, physiologic structures associated with infections. They can be just a handful of cells on a slide or be quite large, and I don't know what they found in these infections. I didn't read the original paper. The ectopic lymphoid structures go away after the infection resolves. It seems that the immune system has ways to set up mini lymph node architecture right by the site of infections, which is very sensible. The same process is going on in a more organized way in the draining lymph node in parallel. Research into these was really hot in the 2010s, but people don't seem to be as into them anymore (but my research has also transitioned to innate immunity from adaptive, so it's likely that I'm no longer in that universe). In general, it doesn't surprise me that when you prime the innate immune system, the adaptive immune system works well. The problem is that pathogens have an incredible suite of tools ready to evade these mechanisms. The doses of the pathogens are typically insanely high too, which I do not think model natural infections well. Anyways, this is intriguing, so I'll take a look at the original paper one of these days. Vaccine research generally is so boring. It's like, we vaccinated, and it worked, or didn't, no mechanism.
- ivan_gammel 7mo agoOr worse. If it is so easy to activate, there must be an evolutionary reason why we don’t have it.
- MarkusQ 7mo agoSystemic cost. We could have paper shredders, blenders, toasters, water taps, and so on that just ran all the time, but our utility bills would be ginormous. Same thing for our bodies.
- Rexxar 7mo agoMaybe it would made the immune system age faster if it is "used" too much.
- ekianjo 7mo agoInflammation is certainly not "free". It causes systemic damage.
- tensor 7mo agoSo does getting infected over and over. Much worse damage. Evolution isn't some magic thing that gives you the most optimal creature for a given metric. The only metric is procreation. Not longevity. Not a pleasant life.
- MathMonkeyMan 7mo agoYep! But you are also a mouse who has limited venues in which to complain. I wonder if the vaccine causes inflammatory and other unpleasant responses when administered. If so, I wonder if those responses go away after the last dose, when the three months of protection begin. Here are the two paragraphs that I found interesting: > The new vaccine, for now known as GLA-3M-052-LS+OVA, mimics the T cell signals that directly stimulate innate immune cells in the lungs. It also contains a harmless antigen, an egg protein called ovalbumin or OVA, which recruits T cells into the lungs to maintain the innate response for weeks to months. > In the study, mice were given a drop of the vaccine in their noses. Some recieved multiple doses, given a week apart. Each mouse was then exposed to one type of respiratory virus. With three doses of the vaccine, mice were protected against SARS-CoV-2 and other coronaviruses for at least three months.
- Terr_ 7mo ago> It also contains a harmless antigen, an egg protein called ovalbumin or OVA Here's hoping the final product doesn't have a side-effect of inducing an allergy to the main component of egg-whites. Although even if that happened... Would it only apply to the raw materials, as opposed to cooked products where the ovalbumin was denatured by heat? Edit: No, wait! What about "safe to eat" cookie-dough, which uses heat-treated flour and pasteurized eggs as ingredients!? The might still have intact ovalbumin, and obviously I can't give it up.
- shiroiuma 7mo agoAnd what about people who eat actual raw egg? I routinely eat freshly-made cake batter (made with raw eggs; I just clean the bowl, I don't actually gobble tons of raw cake batter), for instance. It's perfectly safe because I live in a country where they actually check eggs for salmonella before selling them and people routinely eat raw eggs on top of things.
- kuerbel 7mo agoRaw flour is just as dangerous. It can contain e coli and salmonella, among other bacteria.
- Animats 7mo agoRight, that's been mentioned elsewhere. A new area of research has opened up. This approach may be more useful for treatment than prevention. It's not really a vaccine; it's more like an induced vaccine response. Keeping the immune system in that state full time might be a problem. But after an infection, that's what's wanted.
- rossdavidh 7mo agoI think that "vaccine" is really not the right word to use for this; they sound as different as bandages and blood transfusions. But if it works as advertised, it could be useful if used in the right situation. I do wonder if the kind of people who got vaccinated 10 times against Covid-19 will end up trying to get a sniff of this every month? Kind of like how we overuse antibiotics in cleaners. It seems like it would be best if saved for an "oh shoot" kind of situation.
- xattt 7mo agoInoculation?
- ipaddr 7mo agoSome autoimmune diseases are a result of an immune system always on.
- standardUser 7mo agoPeople with severe allergies or at high risk would probably make the tradeoff even if side effects were a problem. If they're not a problem, I could see most people taking this regularly just to avoid the nuisance of respiratory infections.
- infinitewars 7mo agoYes, I've had exactly this ever since my first COVID experience. If I come across anyone with even a tiny level of COVID or flu, it sets of inflammation in my lungs within minutes. Haven't gotten sick in six years now but this inflammation has happened probably one hundred times and is indeed quite unpleasant.
- shiroiuma 7mo ago>wouldn't the description of this imply you're stimulating the body to be in an a long-term situation that would be commonly viewed as unpleasant (inflamed, maybe nasal drainage, that type of thing) with the positive tradeoff that you get fewer actual infections? It might be worth it, at least during certain times of the year. For much of the winter, for instance, I already seem to have a lot of nasal drainage and other unpleasant symptoms for the whole time, along with the occasional actual infection which is much more unpleasant. There's certain times when there's big flare-ups of infections such as flu, so maybe giving everyone an annoying vaccine during that time which gives them the sniffles would actually improve things overall.
- modeless 7mo agoThe tradeoff might not be something unpleasant. For example, it might be that the immune system uses a lot more energy in this state, which would be bad for survival in the wild with limited resources but probably harmless or even beneficial for modern humans with abundant food.
- dennis_jeeves2 7mo ago[flagged]
- wat10000 7mo agoThe only human disease that has been eradicated is smallpox. What did that get relabeled to?
- idontwantthis 7mo agoYeah this is the funniest anti-vax stance I've ever heard. I'm really interested to hear what other diseases we've apparently eradicated without telling anyone.
- dennis_jeeves2 7mo ago[flagged]
- cryzinger 7mo agoMeasles and chickenpox aren't even similar pathogens. Chickenpox is more closely related to herpes! (That's also why chickenpox can come back later in life as shingles, the same way cold sores recur... because shingles is reactivated chickenpox, it's not a "relabeled" virus...)
- dennis_jeeves2 7mo ago[flagged]
- asacrowflies 7mo ago[flagged]
- dennis_jeeves2 7mo ago[flagged]
- 7mo ago
- dune-aspen 7mo ago[flagged]
- Horatius77 7mo agoAppears that it is trying to stimulate broad immunity .. instead of any one specific virus/disease. Artificial and overstimulation of our immune systems long-term can't be healthy. Definitely a tradeoff here.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- dionian 7mo agoyou would think so! as a "vaccine skeptic", i think this kind of research is important and patients should be able to decide w/ their doctor which to pursue based on their individual condition. perhaps this tradeoff will be worth it in higher risk individuals.
- curtisf 7mo agoIt could also be useful in low doses to supplement, for example, a seasonal vaccine in a year where they are especially unsure about prevalent strains, or where their predictions were already proved wrong early in the flu season
- butILoveLife 7mo agoCant we say this applies to the flu vaccine? This almost validates why I skip it every year. I get sick after getting the flu vaccine and feel pretty bad for 1-3 days... then I get the flu anyway because they picked the wrong ones.
- SilentM68 7mo ago[flagged]
- stevenalowe 7mo agoIntranasal, no jabs
- SilentM68 7mo ago[flagged]
- SilentM68 7mo ago:)
- stevenalowe 7mo agoDisagree. Prevention of many things via broad immunity seems superior to alleged multiple alleged Cures
- SilentM68 7mo agoPerhaps, but all I've seen in my lifetime is the management of diseases and conditions. For prevention to work, food production needs to change. Doctors, hospitals, colleges used to be free, medicines used to cure (e.g. polio vaccine), doctors experimented on themselves. What changed? In my view, greed, was added to the equation, in all fields, medicine, education (e.g. teachers teach as a means to retire, doctors don't do research). AI is going to fix that for everyone, in my view :|
- deepriverfish 7mo agoas someone with chronic nasal allergies, would this work for me?
- m-schuetz 7mo agoDepending on how bad it is for you, I can recommend thinking about turbinectomy. Had it done due to chronic, allergy related swellings, and it was life changing.
- H4rryp0tt3r 7mo agoTIL! I have dust mite allergies, how will this help?
- m-schuetz 7mo agoIt basically means surgically removing parts of your chronically enlarged/swollen turbinates so that your airways are free again. Along with that I've had a nasal spur removed (slightly blocked airways); Septumplastic (had a slightly deviated septum that also inhibited airflow a bit); and while at it the ENT also recommended and did FESS (Opening/Widening some paths to the sinuses). It was a pretty life changing surgery that finally allowed me to properly sleep again, and do exercises/run while breathing through the nose. For some people, the turbinates may become enlarged again after a while, but for me it's been great for two years already.
- hhjinks 7mo agoHave you considered just doing hyposensibilization therapy? No reason to go the way of surgery before trying that. Worked wonders for me and my array of allergies, dust mites among them.
- m-schuetz 7mo ago(one who recommended surgery here) I tried hyposensibilization therapy, and while it worked for seasonal birch pollen issues, it didn't work for dust mites, oral allergies, and chronically stuffed sinuses.
- algoth1 7mo ago[flagged]
- ChrisArchitect 7mo ago3 weeks old story; Some discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47080267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47080267
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 7mo agoStudy: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aea1260 https://sci-net.xyz/10.1126/science.aea1260 https://sci-net.xyz/10.1126/science.aea1260
- ratmeadow 7mo agoWhat intrigued me the most is why their vaccine reduces allergic reactions too. If the allergic reaction is an immune response, why does administering the vaccine which increases immune response result in a decreased allergic reaction? I'd expect the opposite.
- kenjackson 7mo agoAllergies are not simply overactive immune response. It’s the wrong type of response. What’s really intriguing is how much we can do innate immunity that we have done relatively little with.
- rincebrain 7mo agoI would speculate it's something like, if your innate immune system is running "hotter", it's going to reduce the amount of time it takes to clear anything it runs into, leading to less time spent inflaming anything, in a similar fashion to how it significantly reduced viral payloads, leading to negligible symptoms when the adaptive immune system batted cleanup.
- m-schuetz 7mo agoI'm pretty allergic most of the time (lots of birch cross allergies and dust mites), but sometimes when I'm sick the allergic reactions appear to go down. Allergies can be pretty weird.
- lukan 7mo agoWell yes, as allergies mean the immune system is acting weird and sees harmles things as a threat.
- arjie 7mo agoThey say so in the article but you need a teensy bit more to make the connection. Here's the ELI5 version and then a link to too much detail: You can have a Th1 or a Th2 reaction. One produces one kind of reaction and the other produces a different kind of reaction. And they both inhibit the other. It's a mechanism whose purpose (to the degree purposes exist) is to identify which kind of problem you have and apply as much energy as possible to that because they each fight different kinds of enemies. You'll see in the article they say: > Allergic reactions are caused by a type of immune response known as Th2 response. Unvaccinated mice showed a strong Th2 response and mucus accumulation in their airways. The vaccine quelled the Th2 response and vaccinated mice maintained clear airways Neither of these are immune (haha) to causing problems. Th1 was historically associated with multiple sclerosis. Obviously if your detection mechanism is broken you will create more and more of the wrong kind because of the fact one kind can beat the other with numbers but also because the wrong one won't even get the mis-detected enemy (which might not even be an enemy - and be harmless) out. The too-much-detail: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC27457/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC27457/ > Th1-type cytokines tend to produce the proinflammatory responses responsible for killing intracellular parasites and for perpetuating autoimmune responses. Interferon gamma is the main Th1 cytokine. Excessive proinflammatory responses can lead to uncontrolled tissue damage, so there needs to be a mechanism to counteract this. The Th2-type cytokines include interleukins 4, 5, and 13, which are associated with the promotion of IgE and eosinophilic responses in atopy, and also interleukin-10, which has more of an anti-inflammatory response. In excess, Th2 responses will counteract the Th1 mediated microbicidal action. The optimal scenario would therefore seem to be that humans should produce a well balanced Th1 and Th2 response, suited to the immune challenge. > Many researchers regard allergy as a Th2 weighted imbalance, and recently immunologists have been investigating ways to redirect allergic Th2 responses in favour of Th1 responses to try to reduce the incidence of atopy There's a lot of detail to it. After all, it's an emergent evolved device that we carry, but that's the rough shape of it. You can create one kind of immune response and simultaneously shut down another kind.
- cameldrv 7mo agoThis seems too good to be true. Respiratory infections kill and debilitate a lot of people. If cranking up the innate immune system all the time reduced illness with no downsides, you'd think evolution would have done it already, but it didn't, which makes me think there's probably a downside, and the fact that the innate immune system is only cranked up when a pathogen is detected is probably because the downside is worth it in the presence of a pathogen but not otherwise.
- m-schuetz 7mo agoEvolution just needs people survive long enough to reproduce. If they get sick afterwards, it doesn't care.
- phreeza 7mo agoUnless they are contributing to the survival of their offspring.
- laughing_man 7mo agoIt can work the other way, too. Your offspring may be more likely to survive if you stop consuming resources once they become viable.
- DrScientist 7mo agoAre you sure that availability of resources was a limiting factor during a large part of human evolution? ie what has driven human population growth - a fundamental change in availability of natural resources or a fundamental change in how humans exploited them? I'd argue it's the latter, and that's driven by accumulated knowledge - and before writing - the key repository of that was - old people.
- washadjeffmad 7mo agoHumans have selective adaptations to reduce resource competition between older and younger members of populations - examples are menopause and testosterone levels. Part of the reason it benefited us that some but not all people become old is because people require more attention during two phases of their lives. Our biological evolution has prioritized care for the very young over the very old, with respect to a limit on resources (like attention), effectively until the modern age. In some cultures, for instance, those with teeth must pre-chew food for those without, or expected members to engage in ritual suicide at a certain age.
- analog8374 7mo agoI want my body to be a product sold to me by a corporation.
- 0xWTF 7mo ago3M-052 again? Oh, for fuck's sake. We've been down this road for 15 years now. Every funder who learns about the interferon cascade gets a boner. And then they go to animal trials and meet disappointment. If these guys can get to an IND, good on them, but 3M is really licensing the shit out of this one. Meanwhile, if you've got spare millions laying around, have a look at ENA Respiratory. They've already done a Phase 1 in Australia (entirely admissable for the FDA). Turns out hypoxia creates and anxiety and old people have most of the world's wealth, so COPD is a lucrative market. Another super interesting one is Lumen Biosciences - can't make oil from algae at a viable price point, but for sure they can hit pharma price points, even food supplement price points.
- croes 7mo agoDidn‘t we something similar with antibiotics? At first they helped against a broad spectrum of bacteria but then the bacteria evolved. Damn you Darwin and your evolution.
- JR1427 7mo agoHopefully this wouldn't trigger autoimmune conditions.
- jasonvorhe 7mo ago[flagged]
- xtracto 7mo agoWhat a time to be a Mice!
- ChoGGi 7mo agoIn mice?
- chewbacha 7mo agoThis is cool but I’m sorry, that’s not a vaccine - it’s a prophylactic. A vaccine or inoculation is named because it creates a sustained adaptation to a targeted antigen. Something that boosts immune response is not an acquired adaptation! This would need to be re-upped every month or so. Good for travel and brief encounters. Not an actual immunization. Not too mention boosting cell growth factors can have unintended side effects like cancer! There are immune system cancers and I would be concerned about risks there.
- jml78 7mo agoI would also mention, just general auto-immune diseases. I would be very worried this could trigger those in people who wouldn't have gotten one otherwise.
- CGMthrowaway 7mo agoWhat's interesting to me is that one of the biggest booms in pharma over the last ~10 years has been biologics / monoclonal antibodies that treat auto-immune diseases by SUPRESSING cytokines. Examples include TNF inhibitors like Remicade/Humira/Enbrel; or specific IL-XX inhibitors like Dupixent/Cosentyx/Skyrizi/Tremfya/etc; or interferon therapies for MS. These are increasingly used for a broad (unlimited?) set of autoimmune or inflammatory diseases and work by blocking specific cytokines to reduce immune overactivity. What this treatment does is the opposite side of that coin, it mimics cytokines in order to PROMOTE an immune response. Immune regulation is an area that deserves a lot more research, and there is going to be learning (harm) along the way. An increasing body of science is pointing to autoimmune diseases being triggered by traditional vaccines, which are then treated by the biologics above that increase the likelihood of other disease due to immunosuppression, which can now be treated(?) by a new immunobooster AKA universal vaccine?
- brewcejener 7mo ago[dead]
- jml78 7mo ago
- j_m_b 7mo agoIN MICE should be added to this title
- unsupp0rted 7mo agoNo need: this is always the top comment
- mzmzmzm 7mo agoIt's hard not to get incredibly excited about the second order benefit of this. Remember the first year of COVID when lockdowns actually reduced the common cold and other less lethal bugs? Imagine if this thing worked well at scale--in a generation you could have people straining to remember getting colds all the time.