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mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less

bessstillman.substack.com

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Re: mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less

#11

Post by amluto »

> Why are mRNA vaccines the future?

This may well be true, but I’ll be far more likely to believe it when there’s an mRNA vaccine that’s anywhere near as effective as the best old boring vaccines.

(I admit that my personal favorite, not-mRNA, HSV vaccine candidate is from a company, X-vax, that appears to have forgotten to renew its domain.)

I’m also not entirely clear about the path by which mRNA technology might eliminate persistent infections. Maybe by preventing them in the first place? Maybe via CRISPR?

Re: mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less

#14

Post by eropple »

exabrial wrote: post #7

[flagged]

This is a rewriting of history. Politically extreme oppositional defiant disorder and a concerted effort to sow active disinformation are the roots of the tree that bore that fruit, not vaccine mandates. Mandates followed the oppositional defiance, not the other way 'round.

If you insist on blame--and I can get behind that to some degree--ravening shitheads with political (or, I guess, perhaps mere social-media view counts) greed in their hearts are where to look, not "you are, actually and in fact, rarely but indeed sometimes obligated not to help make things worse for your fellow citizens, and we will make it happen if you lack the civic culture to do so yourself".

Re: mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less

#15

Post by virgildotcodes »

azangru wrote: post #9

> RNA is fragile. So, like in the COVID mRNA vaccines, these instructions can be delivered in a protective fatty bubble called a “lipid nanoparticle.” Think of it like a balloon made of fatty acids, with the instructions nestled inside. Once injected, these lipid nanoparticles take the mRNA instructions into cells, where the fatty bubble degrades, mRNA instructions are released, and the cell’s machinery start to prod…

Isn’t this also basically what happens to countless of our cells every day through natural exposure to viruses?

Re: mRNA vaccines: let's eradicate herpes, cure cancer, and be sick a whole lot less

#18

Post by mateo1 »

cgh wrote: post #4

This is about as succinct a summary as it gets re mRNA's potential: "To create an mRNA cancer vaccine, a patient’s tumor is biopsied to identify unique target mutations —> mRNA correlating to mutations is synthesized and injected into the patient —> the patient’s cells create the targeted protein —> the creation of foreign proteins stimulates the immune system and teaches it how to recognize the target protein —> The…

This has a precondition: the existence of targets unique to the cancer cell. That's not necessarily true. In theory you can have cancerous cells that are (at least in the epitope-space) indistinguishable from normal cells. I'm not a doctor, and I guess (and hope) this is an usual case, but finding a truly unique and dissimilar mutation sounds pretty hard, training the immune system to detect it correctly without generalizing sounds even harder. Potential, sure, and I hope this proceeds and yields some therapies that are safer than chemotherapy, but we need to be realistic with what we'll probably get.
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