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Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

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Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#21

Post by dragontamer »

miklosme wrote: post #17

> The vaccine (...) uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. I love how this technology turns a medical challenges into a software problem. Being able to code medicine will open up an affordable way to personalized drugs, instead of the current day "one size fits all" solutions. What a time to be alive!

I mean, in theory that's possible.

But in practice: personalized medicine is impossible to tests. We rely upon giving tens of thousands of volunteers medicine ahead-of-time to prove if medicine is safe.

While the technology theoretically exists to make and distribute personalized medicine, the ethics and safety questions of doing so remain unanswered.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#22

Post by azinman2 »

monocasa wrote: post #7

I don't quite follow. The whole shtick with problem cancers is that your immune system is ignoring them for whatever reason. mRNA vaccines work by priming the immune system for something it would attack anyway, but under safer circumstances since there's no real virus in the vaccine. What can the mRNA create that the immune system will train on given that the immune system isn't attacking the real thing to begin with…

I don’t know the biology, but mRNA vaccines has been used for cancer for some years now. I wish this message was louder and clearer because people seem to think covid is the first use of the technology.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#23

Post by amelius »

miklosme wrote: post #17

> The vaccine (...) uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. I love how this technology turns a medical challenges into a software problem. Being able to code medicine will open up an affordable way to personalized drugs, instead of the current day "one size fits all" solutions. What a time to be alive!

Uhm yeah, but it also opens up ways for hackers to code all sorts of biological stuff and put it in our bodies. All from behind their keyboards.

Imagine "if dna.get_race() == $RACE then kill();"

Or how about some biological ransomware?

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#24

Post by dragontamer »

amelius wrote: post #23
miklosme wrote: post #17

> The vaccine (...) uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. I love how this technology turns a medical challenges into a software problem. Being able to code medicine will open up an affordable way to personalized drugs, instead of the current day "one size fits all" solutions. What a time to be alive!

Uhm yeah, but it also opens up ways for hackers to code all sorts of biological stuff and put it in our bodies. All from behind their keyboards. Imagine "if dna.get_race() == $RACE then kill();" Or how about some biological ransomware?

That's really not how mRNA works. If DNA is the source code of our body, then mRNA is the machine code that exists in L1-instruction cache. (There's another process out there that copies DNA into more readily processable RNA)

The way any of this mRNA stuff works is by throwing instructions into our body to create certain proteins in certain configurations. For COVID19, the vaccine is... as XKCD-put it... a set of blueprints to build a "fake death star" without any weapons activated.

https://xkcd.com/2425/

------------

mRNA further has a "innate safety" mechanism, in that it degenerates. That's why our body uses DNA after all: because DNA does not degenerate, even though RNA is what's actually executing so to speak.

So any mRNA medicine will have to be strictly temporary, and get its job done in a limited timeframe. The COVID19 virus gets around this fact by self-replicating. The instructions that our cells execute are to create a new COVID19 virus. The original "quine", COVID19 (and all viruses) "print themselves" as part of their execution.

-------------

The "vaccine" is a set of blueprints for the COVID19 "spike protein" (and ONLY the spike-protein). Since it is missing all the other parts of COVID19, it cannot self-replicate. Our body then gets trained on recognizing the COVID19 spike protein, and is ready when the real thing attacks our body.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#25

Post by arrosenberg »

rickdeveloper wrote: post #20
arrosenberg wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you are conflating the antiviral implementation with what the mRNA technology itself is doing. mRNA acts as a blueprint for proteins. Your body has tRNA translation complexes that "read" the mRNA and appropriate the correct amino acid to add to the protein chain. Here is a more detailed description - translation begins about halfway down with the UGCAs: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/transla…

> the correct protein to add to the chain. Slight error: it adds an amino acid to the chain. The chain itself is/will fold into a protein.

That is true, thanks for the correction.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#26

Post by tibbydudeza »

It was done before when they used a inactivated HIV virus to cure a child with leukemia by reprogramming her T cells.

She was in the terminal stage of disease so hence the approval of the experimental treatment , we don't know the long term effects or why it did not work consistently in other patients.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#27

Post by prox »

dragontamer wrote: post #24
amelius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm yeah, but it also opens up ways for hackers to code all sorts of biological stuff and put it in our bodies. All from behind their keyboards. Imagine "if dna.get_race() == $RACE then kill();" Or how about some biological ransomware?

That's really not how mRNA works. If DNA is the source code of our body, then mRNA is the machine code that exists in L1-instruction cache. (There's another process out there that copies DNA into more readily processable RNA) The way any of this mRNA stuff works is by throwing instructions into our body to create certain proteins in certain configurations. For COVID19, the vaccine is... as XKCD-put it... a set of blu…

I believe there are also viruses who can insert themselves into the cells DNA, and there are some articles on how some parts of human DNA is already old virus genome. Viruses are far more dangerous in that regard.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#28

Post by ghc »

dragontamer wrote: post #21
miklosme wrote: post #17

> The vaccine (...) uses messenger RNA, or mRNA, to carry instructions into the human body for making proteins that prime it to attack a specific virus. I love how this technology turns a medical challenges into a software problem. Being able to code medicine will open up an affordable way to personalized drugs, instead of the current day "one size fits all" solutions. What a time to be alive!

I mean, in theory that's possible. But in practice: personalized medicine is impossible to tests. We rely upon giving tens of thousands of volunteers medicine ahead-of-time to prove if medicine is safe. While the technology theoretically exists to make and distribute personalized medicine, the ethics and safety questions of doing so remain unanswered.

Personalized medicine has been tested for years in clinical trials. Trials require tens -- not tens-of-thousands -- of volunteers.

Personalized therapies are being used to treat cancer patients right now, and using machine learning to find the right binding site for a particular patient's tumor should present no more ethical questions than giving them NSAIDs.

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#29

Post by tibbydudeza »

dragontamer wrote: post #24
amelius wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhm yeah, but it also opens up ways for hackers to code all sorts of biological stuff and put it in our bodies. All from behind their keyboards. Imagine "if dna.get_race() == $RACE then kill();" Or how about some biological ransomware?

That's really not how mRNA works. If DNA is the source code of our body, then mRNA is the machine code that exists in L1-instruction cache. (There's another process out there that copies DNA into more readily processable RNA) The way any of this mRNA stuff works is by throwing instructions into our body to create certain proteins in certain configurations. For COVID19, the vaccine is... as XKCD-put it... a set of blu…

DNA = X86 opcodes RNA = UOPS/ROPS

Re: Scientist behind Covid-19 mRNA vaccine says her team's next target is cancer

#30

Post by thepangolino »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #5
vibrio wrote: post #2

"next target"? has been a target since inception. At Moderna or BioNtech Cancer and Gene Therapy were priorities during the last decade or so, with limited evidence of success as far as I can tell. Infectious disease is scientific low hanging fruit for this approach, but has been less attractive commercial opportunities, so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2. The did a good job executing on the vaccines,…

> so received limited focus on that until SARS-COV-2 Or more accurately, until Bill Gates invested and retargeted them at vaccines. These investments predated Covid19 and were in 2015 and 2019.

I’m pretty sure the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccines are based on mRNA vaccine research for the original SARS virus. The only reason that one wasn’t finalised is that the epidemic sort of died out on its own.
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