Can anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?
We’d be much happier with Astra-Zeneca.
BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
11–20 of 75 posts
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#12Headline is a bit funky calling it "Covid-19 vaccine's tech", since this tech has been studied and tested for many other applications.
It seems backwards... Covid-19 vaccine is an instance of this technology, the technology is not a derivative of what they did in Covid-19 vaccine.
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#13Great news! I wonder how much industry resistance there will be. Treating MS patients is a massive industry. Drug treatments are $100k a year currently, replacing that with a single $20 vaccine would be disruptive in the best way.
Given that it doesn't suppress the immune system as much as existing treatments, other parties will likely tell them to go away (patients, doctors, insurance, etc.).
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#14I've re-read the article a couple of times but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. I understand how an mRNA vaccine can teach the immune system to recognize a virus, but in the case of an autoimmune disorder, the challenge is to teach the immune system to stop attacking something, right? How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?
The vaccine (or vaccine product, not sure which) targets the cells that modulate the immune response.
If I understand correctly, it gets the cells to produce the same autoantigen that they are misidentifying, which causes them to slow that activity.
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#15I came up with the same idea for treating autoimmune disease years ago - in my first year of med school, actually. Back then the platform for doing this elegantly via mRNA didn't really exist, though, and I didn't want to drop out of med school to spend a half-decade or more in grad school proving the concept the clumsy way. I'm really glad that it's finally come to fruition, but I definitely feel a bit of regret tha…
Not to worry! When I was a little kid, I couldn't afford new shiny magazines,so I had an idea of an online library hosting all the magazines for a small monthly fee. Guess what, turns out apps like Readly doing exactly that.
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#16I haven't yet seen anyone mention this, but will BioNTech's / Modernas mRNA vaccine need to go through phase 1-3 trials when encoding for other proteins?
The greatest advancement with mRNA is that you can have a vaccine in under a month. But that doesn't help if for each new mRNA encoding you need 9 months worth of health & safety trials.
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#17I haven't yet seen anyone mention this, but will BioNTech's / Modernas mRNA vaccine need to go through phase 1-3 trials when encoding for other proteins? The greatest advancement with mRNA is that you can have a vaccine in under a month. But that doesn't help if for each new mRNA encoding you need 9 months worth of health & safety trials.
As I've understood, (correct me if I'm wrong) one of the main concerns is that you end up with a protein that interferes with other functions of the body in unexpected ways. So I guess it would be prudent to go through phase 1-3 trials again.
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#18I've re-read the article a couple of times but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. I understand how an mRNA vaccine can teach the immune system to recognize a virus, but in the case of an autoimmune disorder, the challenge is to teach the immune system to stop attacking something, right? How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?
It reads like the immune isn't forgetting anything, they just "flood" the system with the proteins that the antibodies would normally attack in nerve cells or brain, thus giving the antibodies another target to "keep them busy".
It sounds like they are creating large quantities of the "offending" protein via the vaccine mNRA mechanism in normal cells. Normally the antibodies/T-cells would attack the myelin coating of nerves and the brain but with the protein being abundantly available anywhere the immune cells are "kept occupied" and leave nerves and brain alone.
If this treatment works as I understand, you would need continuous refreshers each time the mRNA injection is depleted.
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#19Great news! I wonder how much industry resistance there will be. Treating MS patients is a massive industry. Drug treatments are $100k a year currently, replacing that with a single $20 vaccine would be disruptive in the best way.
Wouldn't insurance companies love a lower cost one time treatment?
Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
#20I came up with the same idea for treating autoimmune disease years ago - in my first year of med school, actually. Back then the platform for doing this elegantly via mRNA didn't really exist, though, and I didn't want to drop out of med school to spend a half-decade or more in grad school proving the concept the clumsy way. I'm really glad that it's finally come to fruition, but I definitely feel a bit of regret tha…
Don't feel too bad, the execution depended on a massive world-changing pandemic where funding flowed freely and normal economics just didn't apply.
They were working on applying mRNA technology to other diseases, including (and in particular) cancer, well before the pandemic. While it is true that they have received significant funding this year, they had a $7.6B market cap on Dec 31, 2019 and were already conducting several clinical studies for mRNA-based medicine [1].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200128054759/https://biontech....