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Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

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Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#51

Post by sjg007 »

dhnajsjdnd wrote: post #44
at_a_remove wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see it going full steam ahead, myself, for a few reasons: 1) Do both, for additional safety. 2) PrEP has changed formulations, and may change again. This implies that the previous formulations were not completely optimal. 3) From what I understand, PrEP can be expensive, although your insurance may cover it. You can also get it overseas for much less but many are not comfortable with that. 4) It's a lifetime ex…

The problem with “do both”: if you give your control group PrEP, then you won’t be able to get data to support the vaccine’s efficacy. A trial requires enough infections in the control group to show the vaccine is better.

You pick a high risk group that either doesn’t have access to prep

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#53

Post by m-ee »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #19

Would it be easier to cover more flu strains with an mRNA vaccine? Could we shove like 100 in there?

Not a virologist so I might butcher the explanation, but I think the strategy for universal flu is to target the “stalk” part of the virus since it’s similar across strains. We currently target the surface proteins since it’s easier to make a vaccine this way, but it differs more across the strains. Going after the stall would mean we don’t need to shove 100 different strains in there. I don’t know if this will be easier with mRNA technology.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#54

Post by gbrown »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #12
elil17 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a Lyme disease vaccine. However, the manufacturer refuses to sell it for human use due to PR threats from conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, creating vaccines is only half the battle. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

It's very odd that dogs can get vaccinated for Lyme but not humans...

You can orally actually vaccinate the reservoir species (mice) in targeted areas as well to disrupt the enzootic cycle.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#55

Post by ev1 »

dhnajsjdnd wrote: post #46
greg5green wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a lot of places in the world that have not approved PrEP. And just like a birth control pill, it has to be taken daily -- and that is something that is hard for a lot of people to do consistently. Even in the West, isn't it really expensive?

The sticker price is very high but nobody pays it. It’s free even if you are uninsured, and if you are insured Gilead will reimburse you for any copay. I think the production cost is not that much, so the high price is just a means of extracting profit from the insurance programs.

Unfortunately, you have to give Gilead massive amounts of PII and paystubs/etc for the uninsured free programme, which is utterly insane to an outsider to think about.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#56

Post by schoen »

mikeyouse wrote: post #26
xupybd wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't they already have flu vaccines. I thought the issue was that they changed so rapidly the vaccines can't keep up?

Yeah, it's very difficult to predict which are going to be the dominant strains so they take a best guess, include the several candidates that they expect to be most virulent that season and ship that as the "flu vaccine" that season. The hope is that with a much faster time from approval -> production, in theory we could reassess in October / December / February and vaccinate against the most virulent strains that a…

That would be an amazing world. What do regulators think of the "platform approval" concept, though? I can't imagine that this kind of approval currently exists under most governments' regulatory regimes for vaccines.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#57

Post by pkaye »

Blahah wrote: post #15
deelowe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines are interesting, but I'm much more intrigued by what this may mean for future therapeutics if their methods work well moving forward.

There are a lot of companies (including mine) that have been working on personalised, target, combinatorial, interfering, etc. RNA therapeutics for quite some time. The success of RNA vaccines in the last year has really opened up the potential for pharma partnerships to test and develop these kinds of things. They have built out the infrastructure and there's a broad confidence and awareness of the basic concepts th…

Can you name some of these companies or what to search form. I'm curious what things they are working on.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#58

Post by someperson »

m-ee wrote: post #48
m3kw9 wrote: post #41

The HIV one is interesting, I wonder what strategy they will use with that?

Some more detail in this article from July, they’re using mRNA to make the body produce virus like particles https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-...

Any effective HIV vaccine would presumably cause false-positives to the HIV antibody tests. Recently an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate trial was halted due to participants developing antibodies to proteins in the vaccine that were taken from HIV genome, causing false-positive on a HIV test. [1] Such false-positives could easily be co-opted by anti-vaxxers especially in light of the the famous Soviet Union disinformation campaign "Operation INFEKTION" [2] that falsely suggested the HIV/AIDS is a man-made virus created by the United States to cause genocide of Africans. In rural Pakistan, health workers have been killed by villages who see the polio vaccine as a Western conspiracy to sterilize Muslims.

Global mandatory inoculations using a safe and effective HIV vaccine that causes false-positive results on HIV antibody tests would be a field day for anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists everywhere.

[1] https://www.livescience.com/australia-covid-19-vaccine-false...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#60

Post by easytiger »

hinkley wrote: post #49
e9 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.

There are a number of weird diseases that some suspect are side effects of flu infections. It may be that we have to prove a causal link to one or more of those before an elaborate flu vaccine is seen as worth the trouble.

There is very little scrutiny of people who have initial mild flu or no long term respiratory complications. Perhaps more light will be shed in the wake of the over zealous scrutiny that comes with covid 19
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