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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

#51

Post by odyssey7 »

jl2718 wrote: post #8
jfengel wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes sense to me now why this team was so well-positioned to quickly respond to the novel coronavirus.

An individualized vaccine for cancer has to be created and administered fast, within the course of a specific patient’s cancer treatment.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#52

Post by ineedasername »

vibrio wrote: post #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,…

It's a large proof of concept on the safe use of mRNA. Sure, any given implementation might be harmful, but this is (so far) showing that it is not in itself a harmful process.

And there'll be mountains of cash poured into mRNA research now, so if cancer treatment is a viable path, there's a reasonable chance of some success here. But it won't be a cure-all. We use "cancer" as if it were a single disease, but it's really a large group of different diseases with "unwanted cell replication" as the common factor.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#53

Post by ineedasername »

monocasa wrote: post #7

I 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…

Use of mRNA is a much more generalized technique than just producing an immune response. In fact part of the problem in making them an effective delivery system for other therapeutics is trying to avoid triggering an immune response.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#54

Post by arrosenberg »

adrianmonk wrote: post #37
arrosenberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are conflating the antiviral implementation with what the mRNA technology itself is doing. mRNA acts as a blueprint for proteins. Your body has tRNA translation complexes that "read" the mRNA and appropriate the correct amino acid to add to the protein chain. Here is a more detailed description - translation begins about halfway down with the UGCAs: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/transla…

> I could imagine a number of different approaches - targeted inducing of cell death, "painting the target" for chemo drugs, making things like monoclonal (designer) antibodies in-vivo, etc. The article does explicitly call it a "cancer vaccine" (direct quote from the researcher) and says "the same principle [as the COVID-19 vaccine] can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumours". That's more specific th…

> That's more specific than sneaking in with mRNA to get the body to produce something.

No, it really isn't more than that. You could send mRNA code into the body that produces a designer antibody that is specific to the cancer a patient has (similar to CAR-T, Keytruda, etc.), or you could design mRNA that specifically causes cancer cells to express antigens that attract the immune system. I'm obviously oversimplifying a pinnacle of human achievement, but on paper it should work that way.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#55

Post by jghn »

dragontamer wrote: post #34
amelius wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> then mRNA is the machine code that exists in L1-instruction cache But we all know that once an attacker has write-access to the machine code in the cache, all is lost ...

I mean, my point is that "if (race == whatever)" is completely nonsensical from an mRNA perspective. There's no way for mRNA to scan the rest of your DNA sequence to make an if/else determination. mRNA is just gonna execute once its in the body. > Or how about some biological ransomware? Yeah, that's called a poison and antidote / antitoxin. You don't need mRNA for that. Poison someone's food, and as they lie dying,…

Also, one would have to define "race" in genomic terms. Good luck to the person attempting to do that.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#56

Post by gww »

odyssey7 wrote: post #51
jl2718 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It makes sense to me now why this team was so well-positioned to quickly respond to the novel coronavirus. An individualized vaccine for cancer has to be created and administered fast, within the course of a specific patient’s cancer treatment.

I imagine that the tumour would quickly evolve to repress expression, mutate, or completely delete the targetted neoantigen as the neoantigen is probably not required for viability.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#57

Post by oliv__ »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #26

It was done before when they used a inactivated HIV virus to cure a child with leukemia by reprogramming her T cells. She was in the terminal stage of disease so hence the approval of the experimental treatment , we don't know the long term effects or why it did not work consistently in other patients.

This is way too smart for me.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#58

Post by ineedasername »

thelazydogsback wrote: post #43

Anyone more knowledgeable than myself following any of the research saying that the mRNA vaccines can be dangerous due to over/mis-expression, such as: https://carterheavyindustries.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/co...

That's about the barest bit of research with a complete lack of details or stats on their methodology & results. I don't even see details on the specific sequences they claimed to identify. And for what it's worth, I also wasn't able to find the journal itself in any major index either.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#59

Post by stainforth »

arrosenberg wrote: post #54
adrianmonk wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could imagine a number of different approaches - targeted inducing of cell death, "painting the target" for chemo drugs, making things like monoclonal (designer) antibodies in-vivo, etc. The article does explicitly call it a "cancer vaccine" (direct quote from the researcher) and says "the same principle [as the COVID-19 vaccine] can be applied to get the immune system to take on tumours". That's more specific th…

> That's more specific than sneaking in with mRNA to get the body to produce something. No, it really isn't more than that. You could send mRNA code into the body that produces a designer antibody that is specific to the cancer a patient has (similar to CAR-T, Keytruda, etc.), or you could design mRNA that specifically causes cancer cells to express antigens that attract the immune system. I'm obviously oversimplifyi…

Are cancer cells distinct from other cells?

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#60

Post by jl2718 »

gww wrote: post #56
odyssey7 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense to me now why this team was so well-positioned to quickly respond to the novel coronavirus. An individualized vaccine for cancer has to be created and administered fast, within the course of a specific patient’s cancer treatment.

I imagine that the tumour would quickly evolve to repress expression, mutate, or completely delete the targetted neoantigen as the neoantigen is probably not required for viability.

This is absolutely true, and actually the mutations are usually quite diverse already, so it's thought that multiple neoantigens should be targeted simultaneously. However, no matter how much you target, the diversity and evolution of cancer always wins. Therefore, the goal is not to target every last cancer cell, but to trigger enough of an immune response across a wide enough variety of mutations for the B cells to adapt to whatever else they find. This is also the theory of checkpoint blockades, and they will probably be used together.
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