51–60 of 339 posts
I wonder if any, or if many, Moderna employees have been walking around off-the-books immunized since January. I know I would've been tempted.
The article say that they spent a decade of research on mRNA vaccines before. That was obviously well before anybody knew about SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19. Does this mean that the research basically was about creating sort of like a "template" vaccine that can then be specialised or programmed with the specifics of the thing you're trying to vaccinate against?
The layman's explanation I've seen about how these mRNA vaccines work is that they get some of your cells to manufacture a protein that is characteristic of the virus, which the cells release and the immune system takes care of. Then later if you get the virus, the immune system already recognizes that protein and takes care of the virus. Question: why do we need to have our cells make the protein? Couldn't we synthe…
Proteins are chemical compositions - useful machines. Each one (especially outside the context of a cell) requires custom environments to be kept stable. And the processes to manufacture them require other organisms - from which you must now purify that (unstable) protein. And it’s not self-replicating so if you need weekly doses of Ng of material for X doses, you need to produce that much material. RNA solves all of these issues. RNA is a template of common composition that can encode any protein (same chemistry, but in different orders can encode for any arbitrary protein). It can be synthesized in a chemically defined system. And it can persist long enough to produce many generations of proteins. And it can even sometimes be designed to be self replicating. From a theoretical perspective it’s so much better than delivering a custom-purified shot to your blooodstream - different for each virus.
The second question is the hard part - delivery. With the advent of ‘gene therapies’ we needed easy to deliver DNA and RNA to living human cells. We’ve come a long way here and have a number of technologies (oftentimes co-opted from viruses) that range from permanent integration into the cell’s genome (lentivirus) to transient (AAV [see Oxford’s vaccine]) to chemical transfection (Pfizer and Moderna). The RNA in these vaccines is chemically more stable than normal RNA, so it will have half-lives of weeks rather than hours inside cells - but it will degrade after a time and the cells will no longer produce the protein. Proteins in a cell have half-lives of hours to days and even stabilized RNA will be less than a month. After that the material produced by this 'vaccine' will be degraded and gone. However, at that point, the immune system will have permenantly 'encoded' antibodies for the shape of the produced spike protein.
Yes. We need accelerated testing. In the case of a pandemic, we need to make better use of volunteers. I believe that as the history of this one is reckoned with, one of the more interesting moral failures to be acknowledged will be the failure to utilize challenge testing protocols with willing volunteers (give them the vaccine and then deliberately expose them to the virus. It is a calculated risk.) Earlier phases…
Maybe a new test would look like this: 1. Vaccinate humans and animals and see if they create antibodies and test if they can neutralize the virus. 2. Infect animals on placebo and vaccine on purpose. 3. If it improves outcome, infect humans on the vaccine. The old system could be run in parallel
There are these 2 quotes from the article that I think are a little too "handwavy" over potential real problems for the future: > Since the platform itself is pre-tested, we won’t need to do months of testing before distribution. Still, we may need to do some testing on the specific vaccine. Perhaps much of this testing can be done with computer modeling, and some with animal testing. and > The question ultimately co…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the silver lining for this pandemic. Covid-19 is lethal, I'm not discounting that, but in terms of real lethality, this was a good test run to show that this approach works. (At least in my lay person's knowledge.) What really scares me are the highly lethal flu strains (I think H5N5?) The fact that we can produce a vaccine this quickly now gives me hope when we encounter a scenario like out of the mo…
High lethality is often associated with reduced transmissibility. Which makes sense - dead people certainly aren't going to cough on you. In a Sci Fi movie maybe the virus has a long delay, you're infectious for a month with no symptoms, then drop dead in seconds. But in the real world that's less likely the more extreme it gets. One thing that did make this virus more dangerous was that many humans became infectious…
If the strategy is 'everybody stay at home' then it work in the same way shot gun works in eliminating cancer. It works but the cure is worse than the disease.
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Maybe... depends on the virus. This won’t work for things like HIV or rapidly mutating viruses. It will probably work for any relative coronaviruses
Actually, Moderna is working on an hiv vaccine using similar tech. Sounds like they're pretty early on in testing though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is the silver lining for this pandemic. Covid-19 is lethal, I'm not discounting that, but in terms of real lethality, this was a good test run to show that this approach works. (At least in my lay person's knowledge.) What really scares me are the highly lethal flu strains (I think H5N5?) The fact that we can produce a vaccine this quickly now gives me hope when we encounter a scenario like out of the mo…
High lethality is often associated with reduced transmissibility. Which makes sense - dead people certainly aren't going to cough on you. In a Sci Fi movie maybe the virus has a long delay, you're infectious for a month with no symptoms, then drop dead in seconds. But in the real world that's less likely the more extreme it gets. One thing that did make this virus more dangerous was that many humans became infectious…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best $25 million in defense spending ever.
The internet? :-)
As http://cis471.blogspot.com/2012/08/seeding-internet-cost-gov... lays out, the government spent $25 million on ARPAnet, the first packet switched network and the granddaddy of our current Internet. So it was actually the same figure as this grant. (There were followup investments from the government, but the whole thing was around $125 million.)
I could write Twitter in a weekend.