311–320 of 490 posts
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Yes, but what I meant was those would be already approved.
Regulation will take time to catch up. We manage to create and approve a flu vaccine every year, and that's likely because the general process has been approved, and so each iteration is fast tracked. I don't think that's the case with mRNA vaccines yet.
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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…
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> 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…
The thing to understand about vaccines is that they trigger things that your body does all the time by itself. A vaccine is more like kicking off a job than deploying new source code.
I'm not against vaccines at all for the record. But this doesn't seem like a strong argument for them.
Cells multiply by themselves all the time. Triggering that effect is how you get cancer. Your heart beats constantly. Triggering that too much (or in the wrong rhythm) is not a good thing. There are probably a ton more examples.
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…
> 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.
The covid-19 vaccines were very effective at preventing disease and spread until the omicron mutation, which perhaps wouldn't have happened if not for vaccine hesitancy. (but that is an inevitable human nature thing, so you have to accept it and deal with) Fortunately the vaccines were still very effective at preventing death and hospitalization with omicron, I wonder how many lives were saved overall, so far? It is…
I still quarantined the whole time but not a sniffle, no fever, multiple negative covid tests for myself.
If the HIV vaccine works, some people will still get HIV given enough exposure at just the right time, for instance, undergoing cancer treatment notoriously wrecks your immune system, so you might be at risk even with a vaccine then.
You can still get the mumps and measles and everything else you've been vaccinated against given the right circumstances, but you do have far more protection against it than without the vaccines, and in an ideal world where every person was completely vaccinated and any sources of animal to human exposure were eliminated, then should your immune system suffer a setback there wouldn't be anything around you to take advantage of your weakness.
That is what herd immunity is, which was never supposed to be "if 90% of the population is vaccinated then the other 10% are safe" (which is a whole different story).
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Presumably the viral load required for transmission is greater than the viral load required for detection.
That seems like a big if? maybe 0.5% of people actually are succeptable to the lowered viral load. Have studies been done that would detect such a population?
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Just to address this. There is no evidence anyone produced HIV in a lab and then released it, accidentally or not, out into the world. Scientists have established a pretty robust causal chain for where HIV came from. It is plausible that HIV was spreading between humans before we even really had the field of Molecular Biology that would have allowed us to “make” HIV.
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> 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.
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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…
> "these are not the antibodies most humans develop in response to HIV." In many cases. One case, for example was identified from a prostitute in sub-saharan africa who managed to be completely HIV-free. It turned out she had a mutation in her antibodies that caused the antibodies to latch onto things with four sites instead of just 2 (think X shaped instead of V shaped).