Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

them.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 490 posts

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

#161

Post by TaylorAlexander »

meepmorp wrote: post #92
abeppu wrote: post #12

I'm a bit confused by the timing of this. Here's a press release from only a couple months ago, in which a Moderna partnership on an mRNA vaccine showed some benefit in macaques, but mostly in delaying infection (i.e. most macaques in the treatment group still got SHIV). Only two of seven in the treatment group actually remained uninfected. It sounded like researches wanted to refine and validate their protocol befor…

2 out of 7 macaques didn't get infected after 13 weekly (anally administered) exposures to SHIV. The other 5 averaged 8 exposures before infection took place vs 3 exposures in the control group. That's actually pretty good at preventing infection - 28.5% avoided infection completely, with the remainder clearly having a much more robust immunity than control.

I’m curious how that compares to PrEP but I suppose both would be better than one.

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

#162

Post by csours »

sharken wrote: post #96

If a HIV vaccine really is happening, that will really brighten the memory of the last two COVID years. And as always there are some great insights to the inner working of the vaccine, Hacker News doesn't disappoint.

A LOT of really good science was funded over the last two years. It will be a while before it's all understood and integrated. It does give me a little bit of hope.

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

#163

Post by spywaregorilla »

hatware wrote: post #135
spywaregorilla wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a cute common conspiracy theory but it doesn't really hold up. Modern pharma is making progress all the time. E.g. as shown, an HIV vaccine.

Quoted post unavailable.

Maybe, but modern pharma not being responsible for bad things wasn't the original claim.

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

#164

Post by msla »

hatware wrote: post #111
spywaregorilla wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy if they cured cancer.

Quoted post unavailable.

So you think everyone working in the medical and pharmaceutical fields is an utterly amoral antisocial personality disorder case? Because that's what it would take for your conspiracy theory to work. If you honestly can't understand compassion, well...

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

#165

Post by somesanityplz »

khazhoux wrote: post #155
somesanityplz wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am just making a couple of considerations about you, audience, considering I silently read what you comment for years already. This is not a throwaway account. I just felt the need to express my opinion, if you are sad about that, and the only way to answer me is to label me as a "neo-anti-vaxer" you are just demonstrating my point.

But see, you didn't actually make a point in your original comment. I don't mean that rudely. You referred to the "arrogance [we] likely use to discuss the correctness of [our] code." What are actually saying here? If you want to engage in discussion, I encourage you to use plain language. Accuse the community directly of whatever charge you're bringing, and then we can debate.

Would you deploy in production a software (which lack of safety could be critical) without being sure (or have proof) if it will effectively work as expected in 1+ years?

Would you be relaxed being the administrator of such a software?

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

#167

Post by hdjjhhvvhga »

dillondoyle wrote: post #136
aleks224 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>An "elite controller" is a person living with HIV who is able to maintain undetectable viral loads for at least 12 months despite not having started antiretroviral therapy (ART) . Elite controllers are rare: for every two hundred people living with HIV, approximately one may be an elite controller (0.5%). > It is not entirely understood why some patients are able to achieve undetectable viral loads without ART. http…

And undetectable === untransmittable. Just in case people here didn't know.

I didn't know this. Could you explain the reason?

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

#168

Post by mleonhard »

The them.us article [0] says:

> but we’ll be praying ... that by next year, LGBTQ+ communities around the globe will have a new reason to celebrate.

This perpetuates the myth that HIV is mainly a problem for gay people. Can we change to another article, such as [1]?

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports Moderna's HIV vaccine research [2].

[0] https://www.them.us/story/hiv-aids-vaccine-human-trials-mode...

[1] https://www.engadget.com/moderna-mrna-hiv-vaccine-trials-225...

[2] https://www.modernatx.com/ecosystem/strategic-collaborators/...

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

#169

Post by ifyoubuildit »

joshuamorton wrote: post #145
ifyoubuildit wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is because there generally isn't a known mechanism for vaccines to have long term effects. I know a lot of people believe this, but as a developer who regularly deploys code to production, this mindset blows me away. I'm not saying that being a developer means I know anything about this. I'm well aware of my (our? I don't know what you do) peoples habit of thinking being good at our craft means we're also some…

> But if I told someone that I don't need to know the effects of v7.1.3 before patching it because I can't think of a mechanism for it going wrong, and besides, we already released all those other versions and they were fine, I'd hopefully be fired. But this isn't what they're saying. They're saying that there are few to no ways for it to not have any detectable issues for 6 months and then suddenly go wrong (which I…

> But this isn't what they're saying. They're saying that there are few to no ways for it to not have any detectable issues for 6 months and then suddenly go wrong (which I'll note is also true for software!).

Over the years I've become a little obsessed with imagining the ways things can fail (I'm just as fun at parties as you can probably imagine).

An example that immediately jumps to mind where that is not true for software would be something that quietly uses some resource that you didn't expect (open ports, filehandles, space on disk/memory, the space inside of however many bits you have for a field, anything like that). These are things that you don't know to test until you've seen them fail, and only then can you start to automate.

One possible analogy here is cancer or autoimmune issues. If you get diagnosed with either of those today, they almost certainly started a while ago, they just weren't detectable until today. Or maybe they would have been if you knew exactly where to look, just like if you knew to keep an eye on how many ports you had left on your live server. (Not claiming these vaccines cause these things, I'm sure some peoples blood pressure started rising as they read this).

The complexity of software is nowhere near that of the human body or populations of humans, and yet it can be incredibly hard to predict. Multiple backwards compatible versions on the client and server side, running on different hardware with different operating systems, all of these things changing over time. Unexpected behaviors can absolutely show up at any time.

Of course you can't test it all, but you do what you can, and then after that you monitor very carefully, but its way more expensive to fix the problem after it reaches prod. In humans, there's a chance that its not just expensive, it's impossible.

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

#170

Post by pandemicsoul »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #161
meepmorp wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

2 out of 7 macaques didn't get infected after 13 weekly (anally administered) exposures to SHIV. The other 5 averaged 8 exposures before infection took place vs 3 exposures in the control group. That's actually pretty good at preventing infection - 28.5% avoided infection completely, with the remainder clearly having a much more robust immunity than control.

I’m curious how that compares to PrEP but I suppose both would be better than one.

"PrEP reduces the risk of getting HIV from sex by about 99% when taken as prescribed," according to the CDC: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/prep/prep-effectiveness.html
Post reply on HN