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

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

#411

Post by Terry_Roll » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:02 AM UTC

hiptobecubic wrote: post #361

Terry_Roll wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So some other points. Some Sex lubes can make it easier for infections to get into the body. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_lubricant#Water-based Thing is I wonder if a higher vitamin A and zinc intake can help because all epithelial cells need retinol (vitamin A), zinc is needed to move retinol around the body as Retinol Binding Protein (RBP) for epithelial cells. Alcohol can reduce fat soluble vitamins stor…

I had no idea "dry sex" was a thing. I am speechless. wtf?

Its like genital mutilation. These are legacy solutions when legacy forms of govt/social control like religions, royalty or cults were the main educational source for surviving back then. Ironically there still is some truth in things like religious fasting provided your glutathione levels are high enough.

There's no excuse for it in todays day and age, but what can you do? I sometimes think democracy is a soap opera for serious people, whilst the military run the real show.

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

#412

Post by wolverine876 » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:04 AM UTC

outworlder wrote: post #220

f6v wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

One single employee at Pfizer created 10 vaccine candidates in one day. > Now, the thing is that you can’t just sequence a virus, do bioinformatics, synthesize mRNA and package it into a nano particle. You can, and that's exactly what was done. However, out of the 10 or so candidates, they selected a few of the more promising ones to continue research. They are fast to develop. However, there are other steps in the p…

> They are fast to develop. However, there are other steps in the pipeline that aren't so fast.

It doesn't seem meaningful to define development time without including all the steps required to provided an available vaccine to the public

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

#413

Post by FooBarBizBazz » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:06 AM 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…

Seriously! AIDS changed culture tremendously, and created a ton more fear around sex. If a vaccine is developed for it, it will be epochal -- like the introduction of Penicillin.

A cure for AIDS is almost like a cure for cancer, or fusion power. It's one of those technological miracles you thought maybe wouldn't ever come.

Or the Pill, or the Bomb.

(I know antivirals have advanced tremendously, but very few people would choose to be stuck on those. Also the progress was gradual enough that it didn't really affect straight peoples' consciousness. For most, AIDS remained a scary threat on the horizon, persistently uncured, still an eventual death sentence.)

So, this is wonderful news.

I don't think it will actually affect culture very much though. Straight people still worry about pregnancy. People are generally more cautious than they used to be. And the sexual counterrevolution is in full force.

But still. It'll be wonderful to close the chapter on AIDS. And it's inspiring that these long-term projects can eventually pan out.

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

#414

Post by wolverine876 » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:08 AM UTC

lamontcg wrote: post #380

f6v wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If mRNA vaccine was as magical as it was marketed, we wouldn’t be getting 3-4(and soon 5?) doses of the same vaccine with the emergence of new variants. Rather, there would be delta- and omicron-specific vaccine. There are about 5 different false assertions in here with nothing to back them up. The Israelis have found that a 4th shot isn't particularly useful in immocompetent healthy younger adults under 65. We're…

Another reason the vaccines didn't stop the virus is that not enough people got vaccinated.

> The newspapers never should have sold vaccines as a way to stop the virus in its tracks.

Which newspapers? It's easy to take shots at 'the media' (or equivalent).

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

#415

Post by wolverine876 » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:12 AM UTC

refurb wrote: post #407

mlyle wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not the poster. Advil is pretty safe, but sometimes has horrific effects (e.g. Stevens Johnson Syndrome, catastrophic stomach bleeding, etc.) Also, NSAIDs are shown to slow healing from injury in most cases. Ibuprofen is terrifically useful but also a little scary for something we use so routinely. e.g. some parents gave their 7 year old a motrin, and all her skin sloughed off her body and she had brain damage and lo…

That’s ridiculous since SJS and TENS can happen with pretty much any drug. And fatal anaphylactic reactions to vaccines aren’t atypical.

How is atypical defined? They are very rare for the COVID-19 vaccines.

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

#416

Post by aakresearch » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:14 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #324

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 engi…

I think the place where the disagreement or misunderstanding lies is in how we're describing thinking about unknowns. You seem to be taking this from the perspective that, because there are unknowns, literally anything could happen . And we don't think that's the case with my vaccines or code. Pushing v2 of your webapp to master isn't going to cause rockets to launch. There are things that could happen and there are…

Comparing vaccines to software is an analogy I find very nutrient-rich. Basically, it can illustrate many points pro and contra, depending on what direction you're coming from.

Pushing webapp code to master certainly won't result in rockets launch, if only because no sane person physically connects launching platform to build server ("no biological pathway"). On the other hand, deploying build artifacts carries much more risk. This risk is usually mitigated by extensive multi-level testing and appropriate live monitoring. In addition, the target environment for software is, at least theoretically, fully tractable. I.e. it can be de-constructed and understood to the very last bit. It is also fully human-made and controllable, without random nuclear reactors hooked up to web server. If such invariants cannot be established, I think it is not ethical for a senior software engineer to approve mandatory wide-scale deployment. Under such conditions the decision must be strictly on the owner of each server.

In case of vaccine we deal with infinite number of reasonably unique "environments" - human bodies. We know that each of these "environments" are absolutely capable of developing a million of adverse things like cancers, strokes, autoimmune diseases, etc. So, the "biological pathway" exist, the "rocket launchers" are there. Our understanding of inner workings of human body is very imperfect, as demonstrated by the fact that humans still suffer and die from all sorts of diseases. Our monitoring tools are very limited, and our analytical framework is just blunt statistics. The vaccine is, basically, a clever hack into a half-understood system. So, it is certainly up to the owner of the body to decide what to "deploy" into it. And disagreement or misunderstanding, in my opinion, is exactly around the concept "who really owns one's body".

The database analogy is also interesting, in that while the experimental writing code is gone, the database remains modified. In sufficiently complex and poorly understood system how can one guarantee that modified data doesn't cause any unhandled exceptions down the track, especially given the number of vulnerable third-party clients?

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

#417

Post by ifyoubuildit » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:20 AM UTC

joshuamorton wrote: post #395

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One such thing is sudden onset symptoms well after the thing has left your system, because there isn't a biological way for that to have an effect The hard part about conversations like this are that you could have written the definitive book on this stuff, or you could be just another dummy on the internet like me. So I have to take a statement like that and do my best to evaluate it myself, since I have no idea h…

> We know for a fact that vaccines have long term effects. They wouldn't be useful otherwise. It would be nice if they could only have positive long term effects, but why would there be any guarantee of that? Correct, but, and this is the important bit: the only lasting thing the vaccines do is leave your body primed to react to certain proteins (everything else they "do" leaves the body pretty quickly, you can think…

> the only lasting thing the vaccines do is leave your body primed to react to certain proteins

That is of course the goal, and assumes nothing goes wrong in the manufacturing, transport, or delivery mechanism for the payload. But if they haven't been tested for long term adverse effects, how do we know this? And again the answer ends up being because we know how vaccines work and round and round we go.

But let's leave that and assume that it actually does verifiably only prime the immune system to react to certain proteins. Is that some small thing? Immune disorders can range from annoying to horrific, and they're all from just reacting to certain proteins.

> This could be a bad thing, but if it is 1. Anyone who naturally caught covid would also suffer the same consequences

This seems to be a hypothesis. The current vaccines are based on a modified little chunk of a now extinct(?) variant of the virus plus some novel packaging. That they should have the same effect on the body as the whole current or future dominant variant (edit: entering the body via a different pathway) doesn't seem obviously true.

> you'd expect to see the issues as soon as the immune system was primed, this takes days to weeks, not months

Why? I'll use the same example again. If a tiny little tumor were formed, or would be formed over time as a result of some protein reaction that started right after being dosed, why would you expect it to be detectable immediately?

The specific mechanism isn't important, it's just the "we can't think of a way it could fail, therefore we dont need to verify this" is just impossible for me to get my head around.

Feel free to drop the conversation if this gets frustrating. I will continue to ask until I understand, and I may not get there. I'm actually enjoying this, but I know I'm weird and this drives some people nuts.

> Just because you don't understand the human body very well doesn't mean the medical establishment also has equally no clue.

Fair, but that's not my claim. I can be at 1, while the medical establishment is at 100, and actual understanding of what's going on in the body could be 10000. We do some black box testing and get some somewhat repeatable results. That's a pretty amazing feat, but still a far cry from really understanding what's going on under the hood.

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

#418

Post by astura » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:27 AM UTC

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?

https://www.hiv.gov/blog/science-validates-undetectable-untr...

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

#419

Post by TaylorAlexander » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:28 AM UTC

8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #280

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I feel the same way. So much money gets thrown around to solve relatively trivial problems, but I suppose it is like a casino where you hope to win. Whereas no one funding this research expects a financial return.

But you’d think that for example you could consider the tax payers as a body which would generally appreciate a cure to HSV. We could imagine the government funding such things. We just dropped an F-35 in the ocean in the South China Sea. I wonder how much research you could fund for the price of one of those.

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

#420

Post by ifyoubuildit » Tue, Feb 01, 2022, 4:39 AM UTC

aakresearch wrote: post #416

joshuamorton wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the place where the disagreement or misunderstanding lies is in how we're describing thinking about unknowns. You seem to be taking this from the perspective that, because there are unknowns, literally anything could happen . And we don't think that's the case with my vaccines or code. Pushing v2 of your webapp to master isn't going to cause rockets to launch. There are things that could happen and there are…

Comparing vaccines to software is an analogy I find very nutrient-rich. Basically, it can illustrate many points pro and contra, depending on what direction you're coming from. Pushing webapp code to master certainly won't result in rockets launch, if only because no sane person physically connects launching platform to build server ("no biological pathway"). On the other hand, deploying build artifacts carries much…

Yes, what you wrote mirrors a lot of my thoughts and questions on this. These are the kinds of analogies that I can't help but draw when I hear the communications around covid, and there are never any satisfactory answers.