Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
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Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#2"next target"? has been a target since inception.
At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines, but I'm not giving much for these vaccines as proof of concept for scientific success in cancer or orphan disease gene therapy.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#3"next target"? has been a target since inception. At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines,…
Now that it's been proven and the manufacturing scaled, there may be a fair bit of profit in it. If tuberculosis, MRSA, and even malaria can be targets, that would be world-changing.
I'm not even sure how "cancer" is really a target -- are they talking about individualized treatments for your specific cancer cells?
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#4I would first want it to work without side effects and give it time to study. The vaccine is less effective than sputnik vaccine. Given a choice, I would take sputnik 100 times over.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#5"next target"? has been a target since inception. At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines,…
> so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2
Or more accurately, until Bill Gates invested and retargeted them at vaccines. These investments predated Covid19 and were in 2015 and 2019.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#6"next target"? has been a target since inception. At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines,…
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Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#7I don't quite follow. The whole shtick with problem cancers is that your immune system is ignoring them for whatever reason. mRNA vaccines work by priming the immune system for something it would attack anyway, but under safer circumstances since there's no real virus in the vaccine. What can the mRNA create that the immune system will train on given that the immune system isn't attacking the real thing to begin with?
(And to be clear, this obviously is a piece I'm missing rather than a hole I'm trying to punch in their work. They're way smarter than me and wouldn't be working on this unless they had a clear idea)
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#8"next target"? has been a target since inception. At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines,…
Now that it's been proven and the manufacturing scaled, there may be a fair bit of profit in it. If tuberculosis, MRSA, and even malaria can be targets, that would be world-changing. I'm not even sure how "cancer" is really a target -- are they talking about individualized treatments for your specific cancer cells?
The process generally relies on discovery of potent neoantigens within the somatic mutations and then building mRNA to express it. So, yes, the idea is individualized treatment for cancer. I’m not sure there is any relevance for organism-scale immunity like TB/MRSA/malaria.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#9I don't quite follow. The whole shtick with problem cancers is that your immune system is ignoring them for whatever reason. mRNA vaccines work by priming the immune system for something it would attack anyway, but under safer circumstances since there's no real virus in the vaccine. What can the mRNA create that the immune system will train on given that the immune system isn't attacking the real thing to begin with…
My very basic understanding is you customise the mRNA payload towards the immune system targetting the mutating cells that have caused cancer in a patient (after the cancer material has been surgically removed). This prevents the cancer from re-occuring.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#10I don't quite follow. The whole shtick with problem cancers is that your immune system is ignoring them for whatever reason. mRNA vaccines work by priming the immune system for something it would attack anyway, but under safer circumstances since there's no real virus in the vaccine. What can the mRNA create that the immune system will train on given that the immune system isn't attacking the real thing to begin with…
I believe the advantage of the mRNA method is that it’s somewhat generic: you can stick any (protein-coding) RNA fragment into it, and it will be expressed in the body and picked up as a target by the immune system if it has any potential for the latter (I. e. isn’t something that’s ubiquitous in the body already)
As such, it is faster to get from idea to vaccine. Recent history is an example already, but the cycle will be improved dramatically considering the technology is very much still in infancy. It’s also cheaper, to the point that producing ten doses of ten different vaccines may not be more expensive than producing a hundred doses of a single vaccine. This will be helpful against “cancer” which is closer to an unlimited number of different diseases than a single target.