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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

#271

Post by s1artibartfast »

TameAntelope wrote: post #102
Pooge wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you, this is a good resource! But in order to have a good approximation of the effectiveness, we would need people to get infected. If I simplify, I would get vaccinated and stop using protection (i.e. condoms) during intercourse, but then I may catch it and end up living for life with HIV (contrast to COVID where you still have fairly reasonable chances to recover from). How would trials work for things like t…

Not sure what the issue is. Tens of thousands of people get HIV each year; all you need to do is give some of them the vaccine and see if those people get HIV as much as the people you didn't give the vaccine to. People are already getting infected, we don't need to do anything for that to continue to happen.

Easier said than done. In 2019, the estimated number of HIV infections in the U.S. was 34,800 and the rate was 12.6 per 100,000 people. Consider that normal clinical trials are a few hundred people. Men who have sex with men are ~25x more likely to get HIV, so you are still looking at 1 in 3,000 per year. You are talking about some pretty huge trials here even if you are focusing on MSM only.

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

#272

Post by adamrezich »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #217
adamrezich wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure but the set of all people who engage in frequent unprotected sex so as to be possibly susceptible to HIV is strictly smaller than the set of all people who could be possibly affected by covid.

Yes, it is. I'm not sure how we're lost in translation here, so I'll try to express this another way. I think the majority of sexually promiscuous adults aren't particularly concerned about COVID infection, because the likelihood that they'll die from it is low. If they do catch it, they will most likely recover without long-term damage. I think those same adults however are indeed concerned about HIV infection, beca…

well, hopefully that market demand results in getting a drug that is more than adequate at what it's supposed to do, because I'd imagine the consequences would be much worse.

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

#273

Post by johnny22 »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #98
tylerhou wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing long-term effects (1+ years) is not a precondition of approval for most vaccines. It just so happens that vaccines usually take a long time for approval, so we end up knowing long-term effects as a side effect. This is because there generally isn't a known mechanism for vaccines to have long term effects. Not ruling out the possibility, but we understand how vaccines work pretty well. Also, most vaccines are…

> 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…

I kinda think of it as if you were writing an unofficial third party client for a black box remote API that doesn't want third party clients and can update all their official clients in days or weeks in different ways.

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

#274

Post by ceejayoz »

throwaway73838 wrote: post #268
ceejayoz wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same guy believes in homeopathy and that DNA can teleport via radio waves into a sample of pure water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_teleportation It's a whole thing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

It wasn’t just him saying that. I once went on a forum for a journal article, and there were two camps of biologists - those speaking about the similar sections, and those refuting the claims. I noticed that most of the refutations came from scientists with Chinese sounding names. I realize that this is just anecdotal, and you can choose to believe me or not. But that’s what I saw. You may still be able to find it on…

Other commenters have demonstrated it's readily findable on Google, and still bullshit. Paper withdrawn by its authors.

> Looks like he’s been at least partially vindicated.

Did you cite the wrong paragraph?

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

#275

Post by vineyardmike »

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]…

The source appears to be a queer news source, so that's probably the reason behind the focus. HIV is certainly a major concern for the queer community.

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

#276

Post by ckarmann »

ineedasername wrote: post #48

How are human trials on high-risk low-incidence diseases like this conducted?

I am just speculating, but in many diseases like rabies and chickenpox you can give the vaccine after exposure to help the immune system fight the infection. It's because the period between exposure and symptoms is quite long, often more than a month for rabies for example.

HIV can stay in the body for years before developing AIDS. So you can actually recruit people that have been tested positive recently and have not developed the disease.

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

#278

Post by oblio »

ismail wrote: post #267
oblio wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's my take. This is the long term "mRNA platform" product plan slowly coming to fruition. Cool! When am I getting my free 5G?

Your comment insinuates a conspiracy theory, equating OP comment with theories of 5g causing COVID. It does not add much to the discussion and comes across as dismissive. My experience is that as soon as we make a judgement call about someone, and put them in a pre-conceived box that we do agree with, we are unable to learn. I went and re-read OP post. nothing in it is close to what you are insinuating. Yes there may…

The video they linked contains a cherry picked selection of quotes from Faucci and presumably pharma execs about accelerating vaccine approvals and arguing that a pandemic would help with that.

Considering the rest of the comment and the throwaway account, yeah, for sure the comment was in conspiracy-land.

My comment was useless, yes. Flagging it was probably much more impactful.

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

#279

Post by matheusmoreira »

hdjjhhvvhga wrote: post #167
dillondoyle wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

Viral load. Number of viral copies per volume of fluid.

Merely exposing someone to a virus does not necessarily result in widespread infection. A low enough number of copies could be neutralized by the host's immune response before it has a chance to spread significantly. How low this number is depends on the virus. For example, COVID-19 load is higher in symptomatic patients.

Chronic viral infections are managed by reducing as much as possible the number of viral copies in circulation. Risk of transmission is mitigated when number of copies is low enough. There are studies showing risk of HIV transmission approaches zero when HIV load https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_load

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_infective_dose

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Management_of_HIV/AIDS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viral_load_monitoring_for_HIV

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

#280

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #158
Unklejoe wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dr. Friedman and team at UPenn are working on exactly this. An mRNA based prophylactic (and also potentially therapeutic) vaccine for HSV. I think they were originally using some other form of vaccine (a protein vaccine?), but then realized that mRNA was a lot better. He has posted a few video updates on the progress, and it looks good, but of course it hasn't entered phase 1 yet (supposed to start this year).

Yes there are multiple efforts with that one being I think the most promising. They hope to cure the first humans of HSV in 2024. I believe they have all the funding they need for now, having raised over $500k. More details on this subreddit and specifically this sticky: https://www.reddit.com/r/HerpesCureResearch/comments/kg66ds/...

It's interesting how small some of those grants and funding pools are compared to what you see in startup land.

Maybe this is just the economics of viral research, but you'd think that with plenty of people out there willing to pay to cure themselves of HSV, or prevent it, there would be more financial support.

Yet, the people working on the problem have as much funding as the YC Standard Deal announced this month. I wonder why.

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