Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials • Hacker News Board

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

#301

Post by ImaCake » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:16 PM UTC

Veliladon wrote: post #290

Koffiepoeder wrote: post #286

Honest question: since making mrna candidate vaccines is apparently so easy, would it be feasible to include mrna of multiple disease proteins in one vaccine? Is there hope for e.g. a general std-vaccine that covers all of the most common std's?

Yes. On the respiratory side Moderna already have a vaccine in development for quadrivalent flu, COVID-19 and RSV in the same shot projected for a 2023 release.

That would be a pretty damn useful vaccine for society. With a bit of luck and talent we might look back on these years as a turning point for how well we can suppress respiratory infection severity and spread.

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

#302

Post by xienze » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:20 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #100

f6v wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding your second point, isn’t HIV a preventable disease? In the areas where the prevalence is in double digits, people don’t seem to be using condoms or taking other precautions. Why would they be taking vaccine every year?

It's a lot easier to get folks to agree to one or two shots one time than to convince them to change their sexual practices, one would imagine.

> It's a lot easier to get folks to agree to one or two shots one time

Is it gonna be “one or two shots one time” like the Covid vaccine was initially pitched or ...

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

#303

Post by Waterluvian » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:22 PM UTC

abletonlive wrote: post #243

thebradbain wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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’…

>I honestly don’t know why everyone who is sexually active isn’t on PrEP Side effects. People generally don't like to take drugs to prevent things if the chances of acquiring the illness is minimal. For example, if we had an approved vaccine for Malaria, we wouldn't just give it to everybody in the USA, and even if we did, many would not take it.

I had a physician explain that you need to treat the whole person (ie. address symptoms, serious issues, anything demonstrably problematic) because otherwise almost every person could be diagnosed with something and prescribed medications for. If you look for physiological abnormalities, you’ll find some. It’s why he said doctors discourage loading up on useless tests for no reason.

And then you risk creating more side effects in an otherwise healthy, complaint-free person.

A for-profit healthcare system wants this. Which is probably why the States medicates and prescribes so much more compared to other regions.

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

#304

Post by tialaramex » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:22 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #93

epgui wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. I would rather take the "most unsafe" vaccine of the last 30 years than take an Advil. (I am a biochemist)

The one that really surprises me that people take like candy is Tylenol/Panadol/Paracetamol/Acetaminophen. It's the leading cause of acute liver failure in the US. Among common OTCs, its active dose is I believe the closest to its lethal dose. Just 2-3X the recommended daily upper limit can cause liver damage, and when taken around alcohol, the toxicity is dramatically higher. I strongly doubt that Acetaminophen woul…

On the other hand, for some people Paracetamol (in the US Acetaminophen) works very well, and it's really cheap. So although there's been increasing oversight to reduce overdose deaths, I think you're going to keep seeing it available OTC in some form even though you're right it'd never get OK'd if invented today.

Once I realise that the Flu (or whatever) is inducing enough pain that I can't ignore it, or I start to run a serious fever, I take paracetamol to get on top of that, usually in the form of Lemsip because I'm bad at taking pills, Lemsip is cheap, and none of the other ingredients in ordinary Lemsip these days really do anything much, just the paracetamol.

I find maybe 1 or at most 2 of the "maximum" 1g (= 1000mg) doses a day gets the job done, which is well inside the indicated limits.

None of the OTC alternatives do it for me, they're not useless but the effect from the indicated dose is far reduced so I'm glad to have paracetamol. I've had fentanyl after surgery, which was certainly effective but seems like a very bad idea to have around the house, and Entonox after a road accident which again, effective but seems like a bad idea for OTC usage.

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

#305

Post by matwood » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:24 PM UTC

mikaeluman wrote: post #235

I remember growing up being terrified of HIV/AIDS. The idea of something being permanent and transmissible via sex, and literally dismounting your immune defense to all other diseases on the planet... To this day it still terrifies me, even though the treatments have become so good. Each year it seems there are new stories about HIV research, and progress keeps being made. I pray for positive results and am really am…

We must have started having sex at the time (90s?). Even as a straight man, who religiously used condoms (because being terrified), I was scared the first time I took an HIV test.

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

#306

Post by staticassertion » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:25 PM UTC

whimsicalism wrote: post #223

chucksmash wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the viral load required for transmission is greater than the viral load required for detection.

My guess is it is more of a probabilistic thing than a strict threshold.

Yes. Super equals was inappropriate imo.

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

#307

Post by dukeofdoom » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:29 PM UTC

Will you still be able catch HIV and pass it on to others all the same, with "lesser symptoms", until the day you die from HIV?

The post 2021 changed definition of "vaccine" is a bit of any oxymoron.

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

#308

Post by suifbwish » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:34 PM UTC

ianlevesque wrote: post #262

db1234 wrote: post #256

Does anyone know if mRNA tech can be potentially used to cure food allergy in the future? I know that the pattern is to train immune system to recognize a foreign object and attack it but is it possible to train immune system using mRNA to not attack in certain cases? I did come across a paper from 2018 regarding potential use of mRNA to fight food allergy but I haven't come across any updates since then.

I am very not a biologist but I can't picture how this would work. Immunotherapy for food allergies, specifically peanuts, involves basically microdosing the allergen until the immune system chills out. mRNA wouldn't help there, even if you made a vaccine that exposed a peanut protein it'd have the opposite effect you were going for. If you took a different approach and expressed a protein that suppresses the immune…

The mRNA would actually code for the protein (allergen) so they would not need to be injected. The main advantage of mRNA tech is that you can use the same device to create an limited number of inoculations by simply providing blueprints and letting your cells do the rest.

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

#309

Post by Justsignedup » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:36 PM UTC

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…

Last I heard unless you can perfectly destroy it, any vaccine triggers a immune system response, which causes your body to bring more food right up to the virus.

If we can attack the spike protein of the virus, and it can't mutate around it, then the t-cells can still kill it vs just getting consumed faster.

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

#310

Post by ifyoubuildit » Mon, Jan 31, 2022, 11:37 PM UTC

tylerhou wrote: post #241

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 fo…

Let's suppose that your software currently has an incident where the service is degraded. For every day you don't push a fix, you lose 0.X% of revenue. Some engineer creates a fix by turning off some recently added experiment responsible for the service degradation. The rollback passes all unit tests and integration tests. You know this fix is low-risk (maybe because your service was healthy for the ~1 year prior to…

Yeah, I get your point, at the end of the day the net result is what we care about.

But the assumptions that you use to calculate that net are where all of the disagreements stem from. In your example, you've constrained it to losing well defined revenue, and "you know this fix is low risk", so the answer is easy.

Maybe (wrongly or rightly) you don't have faith in the revenue numbers, or in the test suite or the engineers writing the tests or the fix, maybe there's office politics involved, etc.

This thread started with my reaction to these lines from op:

> 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. [...]

I've seen this claim dozens of times, and it always always always makes me think of those scenarios where you find a bug in code that you or someone you trust/respect wrote from the ground up, and you wonder "how in the f*** did this ever work?". I'm not claiming I'm right to feel that way, maybe this is a defect in my character, but I just can't buy the "we understand vaccines pretty well" thing.