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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

#201

Post by rswskg »

thebradbain wrote: post #154
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’m not a doctor, but as a gay man: it’s my understanding HIV doesn’t mutate in the same way a disease like Covid does, at least not in the sense that there’s as many opportunities to spread (i.e. not airborne), so while HIV may actually mutate more in theory, it gets less chances to spread, so less completely-different variants become widespread. Also, as part of “stopping the spread” PrEP has existed for years. It’…

'should be as common practice as wearing a condom and birth control, yet its existence isn’t even known to many people (especially among straight people).' - not sure if you've seen who HIV effects, but if it especially effected straight people in the west (straight people in africa know full well about it) they would know about it.

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

#202

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

xienze wrote: post #129
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.

> 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. Is that why the response to Delta was "just take another dose of the original formulation" and the response to Omicron was "just take another dose of the original formulation until we have the new one made up in a few months"? And who doesn't see another strain t…

> Why exactly did we need to use mRNA tech to crank out new vaccines at the same speed as we did with traditional vaccines?

mRNA tech is a lot newer than "traditional vaccines". I do not expect that the mRNA process is run at the same speed with the same degree of confidence at the same number of facilities. Yet.

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

#203

Post by whizzter »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #189
wan23 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small correction: PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) are both protocols for using drugs to prevent infection. You generally take PrEP drugs every day if you think you're in danger of being exposed, or alternatively take PEP if you think you have been exposed to HIV without any kind of protection, sort of like a morning after pill (but every day for a whole month).

> ...sort of like a morning after pill (but every day for a whole month). Does this mean that there is a cure, but it only works if taken shortly after exposure (and for a whole month)?

It's a post-exposure treatment, don't think that qualifies as a cure. Same thing with the rabies vaccine, it'll only save your life if given before any symptoms occur (and the disease has entrenched itself in the body).

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

#204

Post by _Microft »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #191
Drdrdrq wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reiterate the question, why is that?

Detection means there is enough virus physically present in the sample for the detection technology to identify it. Infection requires virus particles to be physically present in transmission vectors (fluids, droplets, etc). There's generally also a dose-response effect where more particles means more chance of evading the immune system well enough to establish replication in the victim. So a lack of anything to dete…

> So a lack of anything to detect, means a lack of anything to spread an infection.

One should add that for that the threshold for detection has to be lower than the threshold for infection.

Example: let the detection threshold be 10 particles/ml and the infection threshold be 100 particles/ml (*) -> then undetectable implies that it is very improbable that an infection will take place.

(*) This is a very crude description. Think of it like this: Every single virion (virus particle) has a very low probability of causing an infection itself but there is a high number of them and for one them it might just work out (higher viral load -> higher risk of successful infection)

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

#205

Post by space_fountain »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #179
baq wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No detectable virus means no transmissible virus.

To reiterate the question, why is that?

I'm not a biologist and this is based on general knowledge and some quick google searches but:

We're quite good at detecting viruses if we really want to. PCR can amplify DNA so much that we can detect even 50 viruses per milliliter of blood. A milliliter seems like actually a lot of blood to get into someone else and your innate immune system is capable of finding and neutralizing small amounts of contagions relatively well even if it's never seen it before. I do suspect this is a statistical impossibility though probably you could somehow get incredibly unlucky, for example in your blood momentarily all the free floating viruses end up in the same bit of blood and that somehow gets into someone else, but I think we can all realize that probability is tiny and in practice I don't think there are any examples of transmission with undetectable levels of HIV.

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

#206

Post by ampdepolymerase »

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 haven't looked into the Moderna vaccine but in general there are many ways to get rid of a virus. Using the typical B cell + viral glycoprotein is the most obvious way as viral activity is hard to detect when replicating inside a cell but there are many stages in the viral replication process which can be inhibited. Inhibiting protease cleavage of the viral polyprotein or preventing polymerase formation are all possible solutions. They don't really count as vaccines though.

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

#208

Post by SideburnsOfDoom »

f6v wrote: post #56
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.

I think slowly will come the realization that mRNA vaccines aren’t as fast to develop as people thought. Sputnik/AstraZeneca vaccines were released almost at the same time as Moderna/Pfizer. Yes, the latter were first commercial mRNA vaccines, but the technology is nevertheless rather mature. I watched a lecture by the people credited with creating mRNA vaccines and it turns out people have been working on the techno…

> it turns out people have been working on the (mRNA vaccines) technology for decades.

if you mean "Developing mRNA vaccines from nothing to a working product" then yes, that's taken decades.

I don't really think that fact has much to say about if when you're already making millions of doses of commercial mRNA vaccines around the world this year, how fast next year's version can be made, tested, approved, manufactured at scale and deployed. The challenges involved seem to non-overlapping.

"delta- and omicron-specific vaccines" are coming soon, but this is still the very early days on mRNA vaccines, as a commercial mass-scale product.

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

#209

Post by [deleted] »

mleonhard wrote: post #168

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]…

[deleted]

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

#210

Post by s1artibartfast »

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…

Is this related to the concept of original antigenic sin?
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