Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought • Hacker News Board

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#181

Post by johncolanduoni » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:08 AM UTC

jonhohle wrote: post #180

beowulfey wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not the definition of a vaccine. A vaccine is something that registers our active immune system against an antigen, so that our body detects and eradicates it upon detection. The timing doesn't really matter and there are a lot of therapeutic vaccines [1]. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9729511/

I took it as the literal and previously accepted definition was uniformly changed by both government and secular organizations in near unison. As late as January 2021 vaccines were thought of as dead pathogens - https://web.archive.org/web/20210118194713/https://www.merri...

There were plenty of protein subunit vaccines and a few viral vector vaccines in use in humans prior to the COVID vaccines. Neither of these are dead pathogens.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#182

Post by oldgradstudent » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:11 AM UTC

blackbear_ wrote: post #136

oldgradstudent wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a bit expensive, and it took some time to ramp up production. Still impressive, though. The problem was that almost everyone who got the vaccine also caught the disease.

Vaccines are not intended to prevent people from getting the disease. Their purpose is to make the body defeat the disease faster while taking less damage.

This claim would come as a great surprise to the FDA, as they approved it soley for prevention of COVID.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#183

Post by DonsDiscountGas » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:20 AM UTC

base698 wrote: post #169

maxerickson wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you wanna call a thing that stimulates an immune response to an antigen a gene therapy? It's using the same mechanism as vaccines (exposure to the proteins in question), it's utterly bizarre to conflate it with gene therapy. It's probably reasonable to call it a vaccine based immunotherapy.

Because it transcribes something from a gene?

That's not what gene therapy means.

>In 1986, a meeting at the Institute Of Medicine defined gene therapy as the addition or replacement of a gene in a targeted cell type. In the same year, the FDA announced that it had jurisdiction over approving "gene therapy" without defining the term. The FDA added a very broad definition in 1993 of any treatment that would ‘modify or manipulate the expression of genetic material or to alter the biological properties of living cells’. In 2018 this was narrowed to ‘products that mediate their effects by transcription or translation of transferred genetic material or by specifically altering host (human) genetic sequences’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#Classification

mRNA vaccines don't alter the host genome, hence not gene therapy. You could use a broader definition I suppose since (ideally) they lead to the production of certain immune cells; and that would also include all other vaccines.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#184

Post by bsder » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:20 AM UTC

throwup238 wrote: post #177

bluGill wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The side effects of most cancer treatments are aweful. How do they compare?

Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer and usually the patient can recover after the treatment is stopped. Anything that stimulates the immune system runs the risk of increasing its sensitivity too much till it attacks normal cells and at that point, a lot of horrible things can happen ranging from a new mild allergy to neurologica…

> Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer

That's simply not true. Chemotherapy, in particular, is ridiculously bad.

Chemo brain is a thing. Another example, people have to wear cold packs on their hands and feet in order to minimize the neuropathy that some chemotherapies can cause. Other chemotherapies cause your veins to leak with attendant swelling everywhere. Several years after therapy, some of that swelling still persists. Radiation is horrendously bad at damaging intestinal tissue. etc.

Yes, it beats being dead. That's about all you can say about it.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#185

Post by kemotep » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:27 AM UTC

throwaway29812 wrote: post #140

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll tell that to my colleague that got Covid vaccine induced blood clots, and has been told he will be on blood thinners for life. While this is anecdotal, the amount of people I know personally that have told me they had significant health issues with a Covid vaccine or covid booster is weird.

Blood clotting in COVID is higher than instances of Vaccine induced clotting, in every measure. For every example like your colleague, there are many more for COVID itself.

Which begs the question, how do they know that it was vaccine induced blood clots and not covid or any other possible cause of blood clots?

Since at the same time mass vaccination rolled out, essentially all lockdowns were lifted and at least speaking for myself, that is when I caught Covid (and got sick in general again, no colds for almost two years was nice).

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#186

Post by loceng » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:31 AM UTC

blackbear_ wrote: post #151

loceng wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, why patent specifics when you can patent the umbrella which is akin to covering all bases - https://patents.google.com/patent/US10055540B2/en

I'm not sure that patent is worth much to be honest. The general approach has been known and published in research circles for the better part of a decade before the patent was filed, and actually training a machine learning system in that way that gives usable predictions is still an open problem afaik.

[flagged]

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#187

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:33 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #184

throwup238 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer and usually the patient can recover after the treatment is stopped. Anything that stimulates the immune system runs the risk of increasing its sensitivity too much till it attacks normal cells and at that point, a lot of horrible things can happen ranging from a new mild allergy to neurologica…

> Most of them are awful but only in rare cases do they cause permanent damage beyond what is already happening with the cancer That's simply not true. Chemotherapy, in particular, is ridiculously bad . Chemo brain is a thing. Another example, people have to wear cold packs on their hands and feet in order to minimize the neuropathy that some chemotherapies can cause. Other chemotherapies cause your veins to leak wit…

I agree. I have not been through it, myself (crosses self), but I live on Long Island, which means that I have watched a lot of people go through it.

Most recover nearly completely, but they all suffer some permanent effects, like sun sensitivity, hair loss, digestive problems, anemia, weakened immune system, etc.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#188

Post by loceng » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:33 AM UTC

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #153

loceng wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Free market would automatically cause a big influx of money. A "big influx of money from all countries in the world" - if from governments themselves and not individual citizens buying - would in fact be a proof point against its claimed effectiveness, if forcing the otherwise free market (via easily-commonly captured political-government-institutional channels) is what's required to drive funding towards it, e.g. re…

Very little about medical development is free market. But otherwise, I always agree with people taking a default being skeptical approach to any medical news.

The current status quo system, sure, but it's passion of scientists, researchers, biologists who inevitably make discoveries - it's the industrial complex and those wanting to control, mainly for profits sake, that has changed the way it worked and solutions were found early on.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#189

Post by make3 » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 2:58 AM UTC

closewith wrote: post #148

make3 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

huh that sounds exactly like machine learning overfitting vs generalization

Well, over-fitting is a term borrowed from biology (and generalisation from economics), so not surprising in grand terms. Maybe the real surprise for some is that not everything was invented in the valley.

that's definitely not what I meant or implied; it makes sense that the immune system is a classifier of sorts

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#190

Post by jph » Wed, Dec 27, 2023, 3:01 AM UTC

lumb63 wrote: post #84

jph wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes this should really be called a vaccine. A vaccine is a preparation that stimulates the body's immune response against diseases. For example, a specific vaccine injection (such as a flu shot) can boost the body's own immune system to help protect against a specific disease (such as the year's flu variant).

All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases. None of them are (primarily) indicated for preventing recurrence of a non-infectious disease. Whether it meets the technical definition or not, we can probably agree this is fundamentally different to all other vaccines. Also, since no other vaccines are custom to each patient, using the term “vaccine” could cause confusion. Do we really want to give…

> All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases.

This is a common misconception, and that's whythe U.S. CDC is now emphasizing that vaccines can do more to help people.

The most important recent example is the world's widespread rollout of COVID vaccines. These are primarily aimed at better protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death; these are not primarily aimed at preventing an individual from ever being infected by any COVID variant.