Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs • Hacker News Board

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#161

Post by xiphias2 » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

Blahah wrote: post #15

deelowe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines are interesting, but I'm much more intrigued by what this may mean for future therapeutics if their methods work well moving forward.

There are a lot of companies (including mine) that have been working on personalised, target, combinatorial, interfering, etc. RNA therapeutics for quite some time. The success of RNA vaccines in the last year has really opened up the potential for pharma partnerships to test and develop these kinds of things. They have built out the infrastructure and there's a broad confidence and awareness of the basic concepts th…

I thought that only Moderna and BioNTech have the licences for mRNA vaccines.

Astrazeneca is working together with Moderna on respiratory diseases, which is interesting for me, as I have asthma.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#162

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:30 PM UTC

koheripbal wrote: post #148

GuB-42 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some vaccines are also cures. In the case of HIV, the problem is not that the body is unable to properly respond to the disease, the initial infection is usually benign and the immune system produce the antibodies necessary to fight it, that's what being HIV+ means. Problem is, HIV mutates so quickly that the immune system is essentially playing whack-a-mole and cannot eradicate the virus completely. A vaccine that i…

HIV does not mutate in the body. Viruses mutate over tens of thousands or millions of patients. It does not evolve within the space of a single person's infection and does not use mutation to evade the immune system.

Here's an article about HIV mutating in the body: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4574155/

Influenza can barely even copy itself accurately.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#163

Post by Symmetry » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

cycrutchfield wrote: post #12

elil17 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a Lyme disease vaccine. However, the manufacturer refuses to sell it for human use due to PR threats from conspiracy theorists. Unfortunately, creating vaccines is only half the battle. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

It's very odd that dogs can get vaccinated for Lyme but not humans...

We've also have coronavirus vaccines for dogs for a long time. More tolerance for side effects means easier approval means more vaccines which haven't been proven safe to the standards we demand for use in humans.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#164

Post by xiphias2 » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:32 PM UTC

deelowe wrote: post #5

xiphias2 wrote: post #2

Didn't Moderna already announce the seasonal flu vaccine programs on the research presentation day? Anyways, I really hope them to succeed, my mother didn't take the flu vaccine ,,because it's risky and not that useful anyways''. Moderna can make it much more efficient with less side effects, so I'm looking forward to it.

Vaccines are interesting, but I'm much more intrigued by what this may mean for future therapeutics if their methods work well moving forward.

Actually vaccines can be used for lots of therapies. One example is using personalized vaccines for creating immune reaction for cancer by sequencing the cancer DNA and comparing it with non-cancerous DNA.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#165

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

dsign wrote: post #111

inglor_cz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This could be done with the mRNA technology, where you basically "print out" the requested mRNA overnight. Encoding several proteins is possible. How the organism would react to such a flurry of foreign proteins, that is another question. 175 unknown proteins is a lot, the immune system could be roused beyond safe levels. It is possible to kill a person (or a mouse) by overstimulating its immune system.

I'm pretty sure we have way more than 175 different antigens at any given time putting our immune system to work. Or we would, if we were still living in nature. In fact, I often think the issue with Covid is more than anything else our chronically debilitated immune systems.

The question is how many are novel though, not how many there are.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#166

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:55 PM UTC

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #102

e9 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a Netflix documentary called Pandemic about couple that is trying to eradicate flu. They found vaccine that works on all flu viruses but it takes 6 shots to work. That’s not practical at all therefore it’s not on the market yet.

I dunno, plenty of people take an annual flu shot already. Conspiracy glasses on, what if the annual flu vaccine manufacturers are actively preventing a universal vaccine from happening? It's a big recurring source of income for them after all.

Big reward for any defector and that it is hard is a pretty good explanation for not having one yet.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#167

Post by ButWhatFor » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

alexpetralia wrote: post #151

credit_guy wrote: post #141

One of these is for the little known Nipah virus. This virus is really scary. Like the Coronavirus, it jumps to humans from bats. Unlike the Coronavirus, it is extremely lethal. In the last outbreak, in 2018 [1], the case fatality rate was 89%. Fortunately, there were only 19 cases (17 died). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Nipah_virus_outbreak_in_K...

Is my understanding correct that a virus so deadly would quickly peter out because it kills its hosts before it can spread?

It also matters how long it takes to kill - but yes. Assume it takes a month to a kill a person... that’s a lot of time to infect others, especially if say 10 days of that are asymptomatic.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#168

Post by tallanvor » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 2:07 PM UTC

someperson wrote: post #58

m-ee wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some more detail in this article from July, they’re using mRNA to make the body produce virus like particles https://www.aidsmap.com/news/jul-2020/novel-vaccine-induces-...

Any effective HIV vaccine would presumably cause false-positives to the HIV antibody tests. Recently an Australian COVID-19 vaccine candidate trial was halted due to participants developing antibodies to proteins in the vaccine that were taken from HIV genome, causing false-positive on a HIV test. [1] Such false-positives could easily be co-opted by anti-vaxxers especially in light of the the famous Soviet Union disi…

I mean, the mRNA vaccine would work by producing specific parts of the virus so as to allow the body to mount an immune response, just like the Covid version does... So yes, you would expect HIV antibodies to be produced.

Personally, I think most people care more about having vaccines for diseases like HIV than worrying about what anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists believe.

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#169

Post by high_density » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 2:12 PM UTC

Symmetry wrote: post #160

williamdclt wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also depends on how long it stays asymptomatic (so that a host can go around and infect other people before dying) and how well it spreads from host to host, and probably other factors that I don't know about

AIDS, for instance, also had an extremely high case fatality rate before modern treatment but due to it's slow progression it can spread just fine.

+1.

btw, maybe moderna can go after AIDS sometime later? I wonder how mRNA vaccines will work for AIDS patients...

Re: Moderna is announcing three new vaccine programs

#170

Post by deelowe » Tue, Jan 12, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

xiphias2 wrote: post #164

deelowe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vaccines are interesting, but I'm much more intrigued by what this may mean for future therapeutics if their methods work well moving forward.

Actually vaccines can be used for lots of therapies. One example is using personalized vaccines for creating immune reaction for cancer by sequencing the cancer DNA and comparing it with non-cancerous DNA.

Sorry. Yes, this is exactly what I was referring to.