Anyone else getting 'I am Legend' vibes?
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
#62Anyone else getting 'I am Legend' vibes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xY6Ffy_wE
Absolutely. When the vaccine was first announced, I immediately thought of the movie.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#63I 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 was wondering the same thing. Vaccination means exercising against a mockup foe before meeting the real enemy. But the cancer patient is already deep into the battle, how could adding mockup enemies help winning?
Perhaps the molecules they want the immune system to attack aren't sufficiently mobile, sticking to the tumor instead of diffusing into the entire body?
From what I've picked up in the pandemic the immune system has a dedicated proving ground spots where experimentation is happening, and relies on special cells to transport foe candidates into those proving grounds (just like a programmer would gather problematic input samples in their unit tests). Maybe the tumor bits they want attacked cannot be transported to "lab organ", but fragments created separately, from mRNA injections, could, and once the immune system is producing antibodies against those fragments they will also react with the immobile real tumor bits.
Purely speculative on my part, but maybe it really is something along those lines?
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#64Anyone else getting 'I am Legend' vibes? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3xY6Ffy_wE
Absolutely. When the vaccine was first announced, I immediately thought of the movie.
Yeah, and the part about cancer in the article is almost identical to the movie's plot, where they used a measles vaccine to cure cancer.
Edit: I am not anti-vaxxer, just talking about the movie.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#65I know that they've made HIV a chronic condition rather than a deadly disease, but I'd still like to see it eradicated with a vaccine. Same for herpes and viral hepatitis. I hope they tackle all those in due time.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#66It 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.
Accessible and reasonably good NYT article: https://archive.md/5nWok (https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/health/a-breakthrough-aga...)
And as of 2019, the patient is still cancer free: https://emilywhiteheadfoundation.org/news/celebrating-7-year...
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#67It 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.
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Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#68"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,…
This will be another tool next to radiation and chemotherapy to fight cancer; it won't be a cancer cure.
The problem is that every tumor is different. If the idea is to create a vaccine that attacks the tumor, it can be faster and easier with mRNA to develop an individualized vaccine.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
To a certain extent because they need to consume vast amounts of resources. It's not perfect though so it's generally assumed that every type of chemotherapy has collateral damage of some sort as regular cells also get accidentally killed.
Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer
#70From poking around on the BioNTech website and their associated press releases and papers from people who work there, it seemed that their founding goal was to develop personalized gene therapies for cancer. (Do a biopsy, send it in, cook some mRNA, send back a shot...)
My understanding is there was basically a "hey, we can repurpose our stuff for something really important" moment. Which they did, enabling them to produce a working shot with unbelievable speed. (I read somewhere that sequenced sars-cov2 genome to first vaccine shot was something like 48h for them)