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Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

investors.modernatx.com

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Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#111

Post by dsign »

inglor_cz wrote: post #106
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm ignorant, but could they put a tiny dose of all 175 variants into a single shot and yeet that into people in one go?

This could be done with the mRNA technology, where you basically "print out" the requested mRNA overnight. Encoding several proteins is possible. How the organism would react to such a flurry of foreign proteins, that is another question. 175 unknown proteins is a lot, the immune system could be roused beyond safe levels. It is possible to kill a person (or a mouse) by overstimulating its immune system.

I'm pretty sure we have way more than 175 different antigens at any given time putting our immune system to work. Or we would, if we were still living in nature. In fact, I often think the issue with Covid is more than anything else our chronically debilitated immune systems.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#112

Post by inglor_cz »

dsign wrote: post #111
inglor_cz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be done with the mRNA technology, where you basically "print out" the requested mRNA overnight. Encoding several proteins is possible. How the organism would react to such a flurry of foreign proteins, that is another question. 175 unknown proteins is a lot, the immune system could be roused beyond safe levels. It is possible to kill a person (or a mouse) by overstimulating its immune system.

I'm pretty sure we have way more than 175 different antigens at any given time putting our immune system to work. Or we would, if we were still living in nature. In fact, I often think the issue with Covid is more than anything else our chronically debilitated immune systems.

This is a question that would need experiments to settle. AFAIK the original research around mRNA vaccines had to navigate the gap between "not stimulating enough" and "stimulating too much" very carefully.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#113

Post by Traubenfuchs »

unlikelymordant wrote: post #71
someperson wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disi…

Wouldnt you want a hiv vaccine to create hiv antibodies? What other mechanism is there for the body to fight off a virus?

I believe the other kind of specific immunity mechanism is referred to as "cellular immunity". But yeah, I had the same thought you had.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#114

Post by corin_ »

CryptoPunk wrote: post #66
syntaxing wrote: post #31

Damn can you imagine? I never imagined that an HIV vaccine would be possible within my lifetime. Kind of reminds me of HepC. An older coworker told me how a friend killed himself back in the day for getting HepC from tainted blood (pretty much a death sentence at that time and it consumed him). But now it’s possible to CURE it and hopefully it’ll be the same for HIV soon. Fuck, science like this is amazing.

Just to be clear, a vaccine doesn't cure a disease. It prevents one from contracting it.

Also worth mentioning that while we don't have an exact "cure" for HIV, we do now have treatments that (if you or your country can and will pay for it) can make having HIV into something that not only doesn't ruin your live, but that even can't be spread from you to people you have sex with.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#115

Post by tempestn »

lysp wrote: post #84
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, can we get a vaccine for most of the common colds??

Found this: https://www.verywellhealth.com/why-there-will-never-be-a-vac... > Vaccines target a specific virus or pathogen. One difficulty with developing a vaccine for the common cold is there are at least 200 different viruses that can cause cold symptoms, including rhinovirus, coronavirus, adenoviruses, and parainfluenza.1 > Rhinovirus makes up about 75% of colds. Still, there are more than 150 strains of it circu…

Rhinoviruses make up ~75%, but the other 25% are made up of only a handful (4 iirc) of coronaviruses. Definitely seems like you could at least make a vaccine for those, and eliminating 25% of colds would be nothing to sneeze at. (Pun very much intended...)

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#116

Post by tempestn »

schoen wrote: post #56
mikeyouse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My understanding is that this, or something like it, is already done for flu vaccines; that's exactly how they're able to release updated versions each year.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#117

Post by tempestn »

Bellamy wrote: post #85
cogman10 wrote: post #3

Really good news! Hopefully these get approved relatively quickly. I'm most excited about the seasonal flu vaccine. That could be a major game changer.

I can't understand people who wants to get vaccinated yearly for just a flu. Please make me understand. I mean it's just a flu and we have Netflix. As a Moderna shareholder I think that is stupid. As a healthy eater I think that is really stupid. Now I can only think I must be really stupid.

Surely you've heard the arguments against people making this same case for COVID. "I'm young, so it's not going to kill me - what's the big deal?" First of all, even if it's unlikely, it could kill or debilitate you. (Both covid-19 and, to a lesser but still present extent, the flu.) More importantly, if you don't get it, you can't pass it on to someone else who might be at higher risk.

And on top of those excellent reasons, getting a flu shot is a momentary discomfort, so why not, even if just to avoid the potential discomfort of a flu?

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#118

Post by tempestn »

viraptor wrote: post #43
artificialLimbs wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Does elderberry not work for you? Some anecdata: I had the flu NUMEROUS times as a child/young adult. I know what the flu feels like. A couple of years ago, I got the flu (no, I didn't go to the doctor because I knew it was 'just' the flu). I was feeling crummy one day, and the next I was curled up in bed, unable to move, fever with body aches, and slept most of that day. My wife told me about elderberry and gav…

You didn't know whether it was just the flu. You don't know what your results would be otherwise. Don't give advice based on n=1 where you don't even know the disease. You can have flu you barely notice as well as common cold that keeps you semi-conscious for a couple of days. Unless you get swabbed, you just can't know.

It's also not uncommon to have a "24 hour flu", which aren't actually caused by flu viruses, but result in flu-like symptoms for roughly a day, then a rapid recovery. Sounds like that was the case for OP, and I doubt elderberry had anything to do with it.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#119

Post by Kliment »

lultimouomo wrote: post #99
Kliment wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll try. I'm no expert but I read a lot about this and people keep asking me to explain it to them. First of all, there is no way to entirely prevent infections and transmission of something that replicates in poorly perfused (low blood flow in the area) upper airways. The immune system works by carrying stuff to infection sites via blood, and so you need enough blood at the place where the virus is before it can be…

> So yes, you can theoretically spread it, but once vaccinated you're about as effective at spreading it as a doorknob someone sneezed on You should most definitely point out that yours is a conjecture. A reasonable one, but still completely unsupported by clinical data - not because data refutes it, but because there is no data. All trials only examined the reduction of symptomatic infection; they didn't even try to…

This is true of the large scale vaccine trials, yes. However, there have been several small long term monitoring studies that test immunity persistence post infection recovery, and they seem to show that replication is effectively prevented when exposed to blood serum with acquired immunity with a fairly short time delay (this is what motivated the attempt to do serum transfusions from recovered patients as treatment, but I'm not sure what came of that). That said, you're right that my comparison is overstating the confidence we currently have in this.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#120

Post by tempestn »

at_a_remove wrote: post #45
dhnajsjdnd wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's only a problem for the studies. I'm talking about after the studies. I can see a lot of at-risk people saying "Yeah, I'll do both." I was joking to my doctor that when I get access to the COVID vaccines, I plan on Moderna in one arm and Pfizer in the other.

The comment you replied to was specifically asking how the trial would work given PrEP though.
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