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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#201

Post by sirsar »

airstrike wrote: post #149
sirsar wrote: post #147

Many of the negative comments here seem to have missed something important: > Consider this a pre-registration. I intend to share my test results here. How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results? If it works, that will be a massively important result. If not, it won't be surprising, but _at least he…

> How about, instead of totally dismissing this - in classic HN fashion - with "this can never work" or "this is magical thinking", we let the guy share his results? Sure. How about instead of sharing wishful thinking covered in "this will work because science" OP waits until there are actual results before posting? Anyone can make a vaccine candidate. Few can make a vaccine. Even fewer can make a safe vaccine.

> How about... OP waits until there are actual results before posting?

It seems to me there's value in posting the details before the results are in:

- Helps prevent publication bias, by encouraging posting negative results

- Elicits comments from knowledgeable people who may be able to help

- Discourages doctoring the story after the results are in

> Even fewer can make a safe vaccine.

I don't know, the article, whitepaper, and comments seemed to make a pretty convincing case for the nasal vaccine attempt here to be not very dangerous - probably useless at worst. Do you have a more substantive counterargument?

Re: Making Vaccine

#202

Post by subrat_rout »

flobosg wrote: post #183
subrat_rout wrote: post #158

I completely agree with fabian2k. It's incredibly risky to throw all random sequences peptides into the blood stream for evoking immune response. What happens if a sub-sequence of peptide matches with one of our own's body proteins and our immune system starts building antibody against it? That's what happens in most of autoimmune disease. In addition, most of the peptides that can be synthesized from a protein struc…

> What happens if a sub-sequence of peptide matches with one of our own's body proteins and our immune system starts building antibody against it? The peptide sequences are listed on the whitepaper, so it’s a matter of BLASTing[1] them against the human proteome to check for possible matches. I just did it and there doesn’t seem to be any statistically significant hit. [1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

Ok great to know. But my intention here is to convey that it is dangerous to biohacking a molecule/compound that a user is going to put in his/her body. The peptides after synthesis needs to be rigorously tested(QC/QA) for the desired sequences and to make sure the absence of any undesired epiotopes mixed.

Re: Making Vaccine

#203

Post by Igelau »

ufo wrote: post #64
fpgaminer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a researcher talking about previous attempts at creating coronavirus vaccines. How they resulted not in immunity, but in training the immune system to _over_ respond when a real infection came along. After a bit of digging I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335060/ > An early concern for application of a SARS-CoV vaccine was the experience with other coronavirus infections which indu…

A recent attempt at a dengue vaccine faced a similar problem. The most dangerous kind of dengue fever happens when you are infected a second time, by a different variant than you were infected the first time. It turns out that the vaccine ended up having a similar effect as catching dengue for the first time. People who never had dengue and got vaccinated had a lower chance of catching the disease in the future. But…

This is specifically mentioned in the Radvac paper in the section titled "POSSIBLE MECHANISMS OF VACCINE-ENHANCED DISEASE, VACCINE-INDUCED AUTOIMMUNITY, AND MITIGATION STRATEGIES"

Re: Making Vaccine

#204

Post by jcims »

xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #115
ChuckMcM wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The science is in the whitepaper: https://radvac.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/White-Paper-SA... That said, the interesting bits are: #1) Vaccine design at home. This is an application of what is known colloquially as "bio-hacking" and as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." #2) You can do something for Interesting stuff indeed.

>as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." It's way less impactful. An amateur playing with computers might not achieve what a pro can, but it obviously has some effect. Computer programs are rarely a placebo. Little these so-called bio-hackers do is known to be effective. That's almost by definition.

The capability of independent ‘biohacking’ researchers is increasing at an astronomical rate.

Justin from The Thought Emporium created a fairly durable treatment for his own lactose intolerance https://youtu.be/J3FcbFqSoQY

Re: Making Vaccine

#205

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." It's way less impactful. An amateur playing with computers might not achieve what a pro can, but it obviously has some effect. Computer programs are rarely a placebo. Little these so-called bio-hackers do is known to be effective. That's almost by definition.

It's more difficult due to low observability of the system, low understanding of it, and long deployment cycle. Still, it's hacking molecular nanotechnology. Possible developments are far more interesting than what we do with computers now. Let's give it some time.

I'll give biochemists all the time they need. I'll laugh in the face of anyone with a high school education in biology who injects themselves full of things they found online.

Re: Making Vaccine

#206

Post by mattmaroon »

jerf wrote: post #58
fabian2k wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said that the immune system can cause damage. Vaccines have a very high safety standard as they are given to large numbers of healthy people, so the tolerance for serious side effects is very low. So the development there is very careful, and anything that looks too dangerous is hopefully caught in animal experiments or at worst at phase I. A well known example of how dangerous the immune system can be is the follo…

I have suspected for much of the last year that a lot of people are running on an unexamined "Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism -> Only crazy people think vaccines are ever dangerous in any way -> All vaccines are perfectly safe" psuedo-syllogism. This is false. Put another way, the very fact that we run such massive tests on them before deploying them is itself evidence that the wrong ones can be very da…

Only crazy people think vaccines cause autism. Nobody thinks vaccines are 100% safe. That’s a red herring.

Vaccines that go through proper testing have a very high bar for safety but nothing is 100%.

Re: Making Vaccine

#207

Post by KirillPanov »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #120
xirbeosbwo1234 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>as a topic group is no less impactful than "computer hacking." It's way less impactful. An amateur playing with computers might not achieve what a pro can, but it obviously has some effect. Computer programs are rarely a placebo. Little these so-called bio-hackers do is known to be effective. That's almost by definition.

It's more difficult due to low observability of the system, low understanding of it, and long deployment cycle. Still, it's hacking molecular nanotechnology. Possible developments are far more interesting than what we do with computers now. Let's give it some time.

I'd agree if only they would stay miles away from medicine and human biology.

Re: Making Vaccine

#208

Post by ufo »

roywiggins wrote: post #199
GuB-42 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is all about risk/reward. Covid is very deadly right now, it is the leading cause of death in several countries, including the US. If you catch covid, it roughly doubles your chances of dying for the year, and without a vaccine, it will happen eventually. It means that even an "unsafe" vaccine, you are better off taking a shot. On the other hand, a flu shot has to be extremely safe, because the flu is much less de…

Probably the best example of this is the live oral polio vaccine. It's a bit risky (it occasionally reverts to being infectious) but in a population where polio is endemic it's much safer than letting polio keep circulating. (In places where polio isn't endemic, you get administered a totally inactivated vaccine by injection instead. They don't give everyone that one because it's more complicated to distribute, the o…

Another advantage of the oral vaccine is that it produces better immunity in the gut, which helps cut off assymptomatic transmission in places where polio is still endemic.

Re: Making Vaccine

#209

Post by matthew_stone »

tinus_hn wrote: post #117
angry_octet wrote: post #39

Even if no one dies from this, he and the contrarian happy clappers on lesswrong deserve a special recognition for ingenuity at the Darwin Awards. The field is crowded for 2020, what with HCQ and ivermectin truthers, statistical frauds, denialists and blind optimists, but there is a chance they'll dominate the anti-vaxxers in 2021.

This is a nice analogy to the people who in software propagate the ‘enterprise’ mindset. In their minds, their way is the only way and everyone should and will just conform to their needs. Reality shows that’s not always true, witness for instance the death of the irreplaceable technologies Internet Explorer and Flash. Argue all you want but these vaccines have been taken by hundreds of people with no ill effect alre…

> I’d have directed an institute to run a report on theoretic safety and then a trial on volunteers.

Commonly known as “pre-clinical development” and “clinical trials”

Re: Making Vaccine

#210

Post by xirbeosbwo1234 »

shuckles wrote: post #145
flr03 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suprised to see this post so popular on Less Wrong/the rational community. I can easily imagine the fascination they have for crazy scientists doing experimentations on them selves, cutting all the corners and operating at fair distance of ethical concerns. I'm not very convinced by the "Motivations" section of the article by the way, but that's a nice stunt nonetheless, and quite fascinating indeed.

This is unnecessarily dismissive. IIRC, Josiah Zayner home brewed a vaccine which led to a positive antibody test, which is in and of itself a pretty impressive outcome given the resources he had available to deploy.

There's no such thing as being too dismissive of LessWrong. It is among the more useless parts of the Internet. I fell for it hook, line, and sinker when I was younger and don't want to see anyone make the same mistakes I did.

Stay in school, kids. Or at least don't get your wisdom from a guy whose magnum opus is the world's worst Harry Potter fanfiction.

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