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Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

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Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#31

Post by kbos87 »

luckydata wrote: post #15
thesis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted all much… well actually no it’s pretty obvious. I think you’re right though. The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well? It’s a good question.

because the point he's making is wrong. Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at slowing down the progression of the virus which is key to keep mutations at bay. No vaccine is 100% effective, but even 80% effectiveness radically changes the dynamic of a pandemic, it's so easy to see that I don't understand what can lead someone to deny this fact besides bad faith.

Exactly. The COVID vaccines have been proven over and over again to reliably prevent serious illness across the original strain and every variant of concern we’ve seen since then. The fact that they initially also largely prevented infection against the original strain was a bonus that scientists were never counting on.

Now, just because omicron is better at driving breakthrough infections, that fact is being used in bad faith by some who now say the vaccines “don’t work”, even though they are still as effective at preventing serious illness

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#32

Post by emiliobumachar »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #10

As I understand it, the reason an HIV vaccine has been so difficult to create is that HIV mutates so easily. I understand the basics behind how mRNA vaccines are generated, but I don't understand why this approach would be expected to have any more success in evading the high mutation potential of HIV than other vaccine types. After all, it was even a concern with new coronavirus variants that the original Moderna va…

I definitely don't have any knowledge on the topic. Here are my crackpot opinions:

1) Maybe many or most infected have a single strain each, and a targeted vaccine to each's strain could work as a treatment, similarly to the tetanus and rabies vaccines. Even if not a full cure, could be a way to halt the disease progression with lower cost and side effects than the current treatments available.

2) HIV spreads relatively slowly, so maybe flu-style annual vaccinations to at-risk groups for hot strains could be enough to actually revert the epidemic over decades.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#33

Post by perardi »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #6

> We could be getting even closer to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.

…or it totally could, if it primes T-cells to fully clear the infection, or keep it to such a low level that the viral load is minimized.

HIV has a tremendous latency period. It lurks for a long time before symptom onset. If a vaccine doesn't provide sterilizing immunity, but does prime T-lymphocytes to clear the virus, or keep it to an extremely low viral load, it would make people substantially less likely to spread the virus, or have symptomatic progression to AIDS.

This is, of course, easier said than done.

https://www.aidsmap.com/about-hiv/search-hiv-prevention-vacc...

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#34

Post by solarkraft »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #6

> We could be getting even closer to stopping the spread of HIV/AIDS. Not if it's anything like the Covid-19 vaccines that don't stop someone from contracting or spreading it.

Car brakes are also ineffective because they don't prevent 100% of collisions, huh?

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#35

Post by ausudhz »

Vrondi wrote: post #27
spamizbad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is that mRNA vaccines can be developed much faster than traditional vaccines. So the idea is you have a better chance of "outrunning" a strain.

Quoted post unavailable.

So you think for other vaccine you know the "long term effects"

What you define as "long term"? Because in my definition, in the "long term" we're all dead.

The "long term" effects of many pathologies is also death for example.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#36

Post by mlyle »

Vrondi wrote: post #27
spamizbad wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One reason is that mRNA vaccines can be developed much faster than traditional vaccines. So the idea is you have a better chance of "outrunning" a strain.

Quoted post unavailable.

Three things:

- This isn't really the reason why mRNA is attractive here (see my other comment above). (Though, ability to iterate/try many protein combinations quickly in animal models was helpful).

- Almost no drugs or treatments do we really know the long term picture of. Running studies in a way that lets you detect effects far later in life isn't practical.

- When we're talking about treatments to prevent severe disease, bounding the consequences to be very, very likely to be well below the consequences of the virus times the likely infection chance is "good enough".

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#37

Post by Pooge »

From my understanding, the effectiveness of the vaccine is measured by monitoring - in the real world - how many vaccinated people of a group catches the virus compared with how many unvaccinated did: how would it work in this case? I guess it would just take a lot of years to come up with a good approximation.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#38

Post by firmnoodle »

luckydata wrote: post #15
thesis wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted all much… well actually no it’s pretty obvious. I think you’re right though. The current Covid-19 vaccines are proven to lose efficacy over time. Will the same thing happen with this one as well? It’s a good question.

because the point he's making is wrong. Vaccines are doing a fantastic job at slowing down the progression of the virus which is key to keep mutations at bay. No vaccine is 100% effective, but even 80% effectiveness radically changes the dynamic of a pandemic, it's so easy to see that I don't understand what can lead someone to deny this fact besides bad faith.

I think you may want to revisit your 80%. The vaccine efficacy for sterilization of the virus ended up dropping more quickly than expected and that's even with pre-Delta variants. Look at the Israel data. When you don't understand, I suspect what you are encountering isn't bad faith actors, but more informed people.

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#39

Post by f6v »

mlyle wrote: post #21
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #10

As I understand it, the reason an HIV vaccine has been so difficult to create is that HIV mutates so easily. I understand the basics behind how mRNA vaccines are generated, but I don't understand why this approach would be expected to have any more success in evading the high mutation potential of HIV than other vaccine types. After all, it was even a concern with new coronavirus variants that the original Moderna va…

There's some known HIV "bnAbs", or broadly neutralizing antibodies. The thing is, these are not the antibodies most humans develop in response to HIV. Previous HIV vaccine attempts have only done a fair job at eliciting these broadly neutralizing responses. e.g. SAV001, a "whole killed" HIV vaccine, only produces broadly neutralizing antibodies in about a third of recipients (and less broadly neutralizing response in…

I’m not familiar with vaccine tech. Can’t you grow the peptide of interest and package it in a traditional vaccine?

Re: Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

#40

Post by mlyle »

f6v wrote: post #39
mlyle wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some known HIV "bnAbs", or broadly neutralizing antibodies. The thing is, these are not the antibodies most humans develop in response to HIV. Previous HIV vaccine attempts have only done a fair job at eliciting these broadly neutralizing responses. e.g. SAV001, a "whole killed" HIV vaccine, only produces broadly neutralizing antibodies in about a third of recipients (and less broadly neutralizing response in…

I’m not familiar with vaccine tech. Can’t you grow the peptide of interest and package it in a traditional vaccine?

> Can’t you grow the peptide of interest and package it in a traditional vaccine?

Traditional way to do this is recombinant approaches (mentioned). These are also in progress. mRNA is much quicker to iterate, though. They tried a few candidate sequences in sHIV to guide their human vaccine development.

mRNA vaccines are kind of neat in the way that they create a few day long pulse of new virus-like particles showing up, to ensure the immune system gets really annoyed.

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