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Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

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

#191

Post by JulianMorrison »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #179
baq wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No detectable virus means no transmissible virus.

To reiterate the question, why is that?

Detection means there is enough virus physically present in the sample for the detection technology to identify it.

Infection requires virus particles to be physically present in transmission vectors (fluids, droplets, etc). There's generally also a dose-response effect where more particles means more chance of evading the immune system well enough to establish replication in the victim.

So a lack of anything to detect, means a lack of anything to spread an infection.

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

#192

Post by adamrezich »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #152
adamrezich wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but surely more people would say "my lifestyle choices mean that I'm never going to be exposed to HIV so I don't need a vaccine for it" than ditto for covid?

I think unprotected sex is more common than many people in wealthy countries realise.

sure but the set of all people who engage in frequent unprotected sex so as to be possibly susceptible to HIV is strictly smaller than the set of all people who could be possibly affected by covid.

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

#193

Post by Throwaway24FGH »

mleonhard wrote: post #168

The them.us article [0] says: > but we’ll be praying ... that by next year, LGBTQ+ communities around the globe will have a new reason to celebrate. This perpetuates the myth that HIV is mainly a problem for gay people. Can we change to another article, such as [1]? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports Moderna's HIV vaccine research [2]. [0] https://www.them.us/story/hiv-aids-vaccine-human-trials-mode... [1]…

70% of new HIV cases are among homosexual and bisexual men [1]. If we assume that the incidence of homosexuals and bisexuals among men is 5%, that means that homosexuals and bisexuals are 14x more likely to get infected with HIV than the general population, or 44x more likely than a non-homosexual male [2]. While 44x is certainly not "exclusive to", I think it qualifies as "mainly a problem for".

And, it should go without saying, but let's hope this vaccine pans out!

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/msm/msm-content/incidence.html

[2] 14x is compared to the general population 5% of which is comprised by gay and bisexual men. If 70% of HIV positive people belong to a 5% group, and 30% belong to the 95% group, that's (70%/5%)/(30%/95%) = 44x is the relative risk of contracting HIV if you belong to the gay/bisexual group than if you don't belong

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

#194

Post by pixl97 »

ifyoubuildit wrote: post #140
copperx wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure understanding the biology behind it all can help make predictions about the outcome in the same way that you know that merging a pull request isn't going to bring the entire internet down. I mean, it could. But there's no known mechanism that will trigger such an event. That reminds me of the first atomic bomb test. We weren't 100% sure that the atmosphere wasn't going to ignite with an atomic bomb, b…

> I'm pretty sure understanding the biology behind it all can help make predictions about the outcome ... Of course it can, that's what you use to write your test plan. But I never (ever) rely on those predictions alone. Everyone who has done this long enough knows that if you don't test your code well enough before you push it out, it will fail. Hell, it'll even fail sometimes when you did thoroughly test it.

Well, in computers our test plans generally run in seconds.

If you had to push code and wait a year for feedback then how you tested and pushed code would change dramatically.

Now imagine the environment you were pushing code to was

1. Always changing in very small ways that could sometimes have huge affects due to completely random variable changes you had no control over. 2. Every host your ran your software on 'could be' different in ways that are incompatible and you have no way of testing all of them.

Welcome to the problem space of biology.

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

#195

Post by Drdrdrq »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #191
Drdrdrq wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To reiterate the question, why is that?

Detection means there is enough virus physically present in the sample for the detection technology to identify it. Infection requires virus particles to be physically present in transmission vectors (fluids, droplets, etc). There's generally also a dose-response effect where more particles means more chance of evading the immune system well enough to establish replication in the victim. So a lack of anything to dete…

Thank you, makes sense!

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

#196

Post by Throwaway24FGH »

TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #180
bruceb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More like it perpetuates the myth that LGBTQ+ is a monolithic group. HIV is more concerning for Gay men for a variety of reasons. There is nothing wrong with pointing out the obvious. Ask anyone who takes prep.

Your comment perpetuates the myth that gay men as a group are a homogenous whole. More specifically HIV, it's more of a concern for non-monogamous gay, and bisexual, men who engaging in unprotected anal intercourse.

Indeed, but the numbers from the CDC suggest that "non-monogamous gay, and bisexual, men who engaging in unprotected anal intercourse" are a very large part of the community.

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

#197

Post by semerda »

tialaramex wrote: post #89
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…

Both the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and Sputnik are using a pretty similar trick that gives them the speed-up. They still get to pick an arbitrary sequence, but they're smuggling it inside a virus instead of as mRNA. That's why the codename for the AstraZeneca vaccine is ChAdOx1, it's a Chimp Adenovirus as host for the sequence. Take this mild uninteresting chimpanzee virus, but tweak it to tell human cells to produc…

I wouldn't call it arbitrary sequence, it's a specific sequence ie. s protein for covid.

Saying that, it's now a known cause of blood clotting in some recipients: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213

"chimpanzee adenovirus Y25 (ChAdOx1), human adenovirus type 5 (HAd-V-C5) and human adenovirus type 26 (HAdV-D26) — the scientists found that ChAdOx1 had a strong negative charge, which meant that it attracted PF4, which has a positive charge."

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

#198

Post by Nbox9 »

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?

CDC backing up this claim. Having an undetectable viral load prevents transmission during sex —- but likely not during needle sharing. The answer to why seems to be an obvious “because there are less virus particles”. I’m linking a couple of scientific studies following couples having condomless sex where one partner is HIV positive, on ART with low viral load. Among the about 2000 couples in these studies there were no transmissions.

https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/livingwithhiv/protecting-othe... https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1600693#t=articl... https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27404185/

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

#199

Post by voz_ »

mleonhard wrote: post #168

The them.us article [0] says: > but we’ll be praying ... that by next year, LGBTQ+ communities around the globe will have a new reason to celebrate. This perpetuates the myth that HIV is mainly a problem for gay people. Can we change to another article, such as [1]? The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation supports Moderna's HIV vaccine research [2]. [0] https://www.them.us/story/hiv-aids-vaccine-human-trials-mode... [1]…

I don't understand how a fact is a myth?

https://www.reuters.com/article/health-global-aids/men-with-...

There is no shame in it, different diseases and viruses affect different people differently, because of different behaviors. It does not make Gay people worse, or better. It just means the actions they participate in, as a demographic cohort, is more likely to lead to an HIV infection when normalized for factors against another, non Gay, group.

HIV has always been a huge thing in the gay community, and erasing that or trying to shift from that is an odd form of historical rewriting. Anyone who lived in SF during the HIV epidemic remembers this.

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

#200

Post by tragictrash »

Drdrdrq wrote: post #189
wan23 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small correction: PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis) and PEP (post-exposure prophylaxis) are both protocols for using drugs to prevent infection. You generally take PrEP drugs every day if you think you're in danger of being exposed, or alternatively take PEP if you think you have been exposed to HIV without any kind of protection, sort of like a morning after pill (but every day for a whole month).

> ...sort of like a morning after pill (but every day for a whole month). Does this mean that there is a cure, but it only works if taken shortly after exposure (and for a whole month)?

Not a cure, as that implies recovery from a full infection. It's preventing your body from becoming fully infected.
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