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Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

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Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#251

Post by jph »

Auracle wrote: post #211
jph wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All previous vaccines were aimed at preventing infectious diseases. This is a common misconception, and that's whythe U.S. CDC is now emphasizing that vaccines can do more to help people. The most important recent example is the world's widespread rollout of COVID vaccines. These are primarily aimed at better protection against severe illness, hospitalization, and death; these are not primarily aimed at preventing…

Well that’s just plain revisionist history. Name another example. The flu vaccine, maybe? But that’s because they don’t know which strains to target. Both the CDC director at the time and Biden said the vaccine would prevent you from getting COVID. It’s insane we’re changing the definition of words because the COVID vaccines were kinda crappy and that would be bad politically. Not that the vaccine discussed here shou…

> Name another example

Sure, another example is the flu vaccine as you mention. The primary aim of the flu vaccine in the U.S. medical system is to protect high-risk people from life-threatening symptoms, even during infections from different strains.

Another example is the shingles vaccine. The primary aim is to prevent severe symptoms (such as neural damage and long term pain) during a reactivation of an existing chronic infection.

> It’s insane we’re changing the definition of words

The semantic meaning of the word vaccine hasn't changed. All that's changed is the U.S. CDC official definition text, to clarify that the primary aim of vaccines is to activate the body's immune system, rather than solely to prevent a new specific infection.

If you're curious about the language exactness, beyond the U.S. CDC, the U.S. FDA is also involved. For example, the U.S. FDA during COVID stated that a vaccine would need to be at least 50% effective for diminishing the severity of COVID-19 symptoms to obtain regulatory and marketing approval. In other words, the primary aim was to help people reduce damage; the primary aim was not to full-stop prevent infection.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#252

Post by throwaway8877 »

throwaway8877 wrote: post #250
Auracle wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd argue that a vaccine that allowed the virus to evolve rapidly out of it because it's only targeting on small section of the virus is pretty crappy by definition. Don't get me wrong, it saved a lot of lives. Compared to every other vaccine we've all taken in our lives it's the absolute bottom of the barrel, and the fact that politically (and possibly for public health reasons) a good portion of politicians effecti…

Do you have any studies to share that confirm this claim? As far I am aware the new variants evolved from regions that were not highly vaccinated like South Africa. Omicron was considerably more virulent than flu - the risk of getting an infection is also a function of prevalence.

But I don't think we'll get any better vaccine soon the medical community appears to be too stubborn for this to happen.

I'm not arguing that vaccines can't or shouldn't be much better. Just that they actually were considerably good if we take everything we should into account.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#253

Post by LorenPechtel »

base698 wrote: post #243
LorenPechtel wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it doesn't. There's no transcribing going on. mRNA is the *result* of transcribing from DNA. The genes aren't touched. In normal operation the genes are the master blueprints from which work orders (in the form of mRNA) are generated. The cells use that mRNA to build the requested proteins. The mRNA vaccines are bogus work orders slipped into the production queue and they go nowhere near the DNA.

I mistyped translation. Been 20 years since biochem. If you think of the gene in RNA form (transcribed from DNA), it's a gene being translated to aminos. The gene is therapy. I get gene therapy isn't used that way but I was trying to fairly interpret what people could mean.

I could see how someone could twist that to "gene therapy" but it's certainly not how I learned biology. Genes are the master copy from which working copies are made for production purposes.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#254

Post by reissbaker »

bugglebeetle wrote: post #174
reissbaker wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO they resulted in massive reductions of death across the world. In a world where pharma companies needed to surrender their IP if it was too useful, Moderna wouldn't have gotten funded to pioneer this new and difficult technology, and mRNA vaccines simply wouldn't exist. Having publicly-funded research doesn't mean you can ignore profit either — the public funding for mRNA was that the initial research was done at…

A long wall of obfuscation and pharmaceutical industry apologetics that can be trivially dismissed by simply pointing at myriad other vaccines that were also publicly-funded, are not constrained by IP, and saved millions of lives. Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it and charge them again for…

Using existing vaccine tech isn't the same as developing entirely new technology, which mRNA is and Cuba's vaccine isn't. And the tech Cuba used was developed by pharma companies first, too — protein subunit vaccines are well established, used for hepatitis B, tetanus, and others.

And if existing tech works well enough — great! Then use it, and don't use the more expensive mRNA ones.

Of course, there are benefits to mRNA vaccines, which is why they were deployed first — Moderna had a working vaccine barely over a month after starting work on it, with only the gene sequence of the virus from Chinese labs to work with. All the rest of the time was just testing. Effectively being able to print a vaccine given a gene sequence is extremely useful.

And again — the state (aka the United States) does not fully fund research. It provides less than half of funding in a non-banner year, and a fraction in boom years. Cutting funding not only would hurt deployment and development, it would also harm fundamental research.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#255

Post by KMag »

shadowgovt wrote: post #145
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for people who’ve had high-risk melanomas removed This is still treatment. They aren’t administering the vaccine to healthy adults. The population is melanoma survivors with a high risk of recurrence.

Isn't this hair splitting on definitions? They are there for vaccinating against future instances of cancer after somebody is in remission from previous instances of cancer. It's not a generally-distributed vaccine, but there are all sorts of vaccines that aren't generally distributed and instead applied only to populations likely to encounter the illness protected against (such as the battery one is exposed to if on…

They're treating the traces of cancer that are very likely left behind after the melanoma removal, that are likely to result in recurrence.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#256

Post by bugglebeetle »

reissbaker wrote: post #254
bugglebeetle wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A long wall of obfuscation and pharmaceutical industry apologetics that can be trivially dismissed by simply pointing at myriad other vaccines that were also publicly-funded, are not constrained by IP, and saved millions of lives. Your last point is also hysterical because yes, the research needs massive investment, the state provides it, and then allows private companies to run off with it and charge them again for…

Using existing vaccine tech isn't the same as developing entirely new technology, which mRNA is and Cuba's vaccine isn't. And the tech Cuba used was developed by pharma companies first, too — protein subunit vaccines are well established, used for hepatitis B, tetanus, and others. And if existing tech works well enough — great! Then use it, and don't use the more expensive mRNA ones. Of course, there are benefits to…

I never argued that they should cut funding, but should reap the benefit of their investment and not allow private companies to run roughshod over them at the expense of global public health. I have no idea why I’m on a VC-backed website explaining the concept of ROI, surrounded by special pleading about how the initial investor (the state) isn’t owed anything in return.

Re: Moderna's mRNA cancer vaccine works better than thought

#258

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

justsee wrote: post #191
DonsDiscountGas wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what gene therapy means. >In 1986, a meeting at the Institute Of Medicine defined gene therapy as the addition or replacement of a gene in a targeted cell type. In the same year, the FDA announced that it had jurisdiction over approving "gene therapy" without defining the term. The FDA added a very broad definition in 1993 of any treatment that would ‘modify or manipulate the expression of genetic material…

mRNA vaccines are a gene therapy, and a gene therapy does not mean "must irreversibly change the genome". Take for instance Moderna's own SEC filing discussing mRNA [1], which summarised the regulatory situation: "Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA. Unlike certain gene therapies that irreversibly alter cell DNA and could act as a source of side effects, mRNA-based medicines are designed t…

Your first link shows is about the FDAs legal definition, and I don't know what the second link is supposed to mean, other than somebody somewhere called it a gene therapy.

I have no commercial interest in any of this, and my opinion is that any definition of "gene therapy" which includes mRNA vaccines is overly broad. "Change the host genome" is clearly what the average person things when they hear "gene therapy", and legal definitions should match that.

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