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BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

fiercebiotech.com

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Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#31

Post by darig »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #5
wittyreference wrote: post #2

I came up with the same idea for treating autoimmune disease years ago - in my first year of med school, actually. Back then the platform for doing this elegantly via mRNA didn't really exist, though, and I didn't want to drop out of med school to spend a half-decade or more in grad school proving the concept the clumsy way. I'm really glad that it's finally come to fruition, but I definitely feel a bit of regret tha…

Don't feel too bad, the execution depended on a massive world-changing pandemic where funding flowed freely and normal economics just didn't apply.

> normal economics just didn't apply.

It wasn't the economics that didn't apply... it was the safety protocols and ethics surrounding the processes of altering the genetics of human tissue.

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#32

Post by a-dub »

pg_bot wrote: post #24
waiseristy wrote: post #16

I haven't yet seen anyone mention this, but will BioNTech's / Modernas mRNA vaccine need to go through phase 1-3 trials when encoding for other proteins? The greatest advancement with mRNA is that you can have a vaccine in under a month. But that doesn't help if for each new mRNA encoding you need 9 months worth of health & safety trials.

Yes, they will have to go through health and safety trials for each additional vaccine developed using this technology. No one gets special treatment when it comes to FDA approval, and this is the way it should be. You can get fast tracked if you show superior effectiveness, meet an unmet medical need, or get rid of serious side effects of an existing therapy. We should look at ways to speed up this process, (in the…

> Yes, they will have to go through health and safety trials for each additional vaccine developed using this technology. No one gets special treatment when it comes to FDA approval, and this is the way it should be.

true, but there are loopholes. the 510(k) loophole for medical devices where any device that is "substantially equivalent" to an existing approved device can get fast track approval has proved problematic. this has been publicly documented both in the press and in independent documentaries for some time.

https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-submissions/pr...

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#33

Post by vondur »

klmadfejno wrote: post #6

Can anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?

I'd assume the traditional route of using virus particles for the vaccine would be used. In fact, I think that's what the Chinese and Russians are using.

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#35

Post by djbebs »

pkaye wrote: post #19
WillPostForFood wrote: post #7

Great news! I wonder how much industry resistance there will be. Treating MS patients is a massive industry. Drug treatments are $100k a year currently, replacing that with a single $20 vaccine would be disruptive in the best way.

Wouldn't insurance companies love a lower cost one time treatment?

Doubtful. Insurances dont run at a loss, every penny that goes into them they take a cut as profits. If the treatment is expensive, great! More demand for their product, and even if their cut is the same, their profit and revenue will be greater.

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#36

Post by syntaxing »

I really hope this mRNA train keeps going and companies succeed executing on it. Does anyone know the status for CRISPR medical technology? I remembering hearing about all these great applications using CaaS-9 and 13 but I haven’t really heard any new medical breakthroughs recently (though the hemophilia “cure” was awesome!).

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#37

Post by folli »

NickM wrote: post #8

I've re-read the article a couple of times but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. I understand how an mRNA vaccine can teach the immune system to recognize a virus, but in the case of an autoimmune disorder, the challenge is to teach the immune system to stop attacking something, right? How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?

Derek Lowe, as usual, explains this quite nicely: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/01/12/mo...

To quote:

One goal has been to try to selectively affect autoreactive T cells, but that’s a lot easier said than done. The regulatory T cells and regulatory B cells are key players in immune tolerance, the “friend or foe” recognition system that keeps our own immune systems from attacking everything in sight. If you could present some of the antigens involved to those cells in a way that they accepted them as normal human proteins rather than as an external threat, you could presumably turn down their response.

BioNTech and others have been trying to target the population of lymphoid antigen-presenting cells, known to be very important in immune tolerance mechanisms, but without setting off any of the general inflammation pathways. They have a liposomal formulation that when injected into the muscle tissue seems to end up almost entirely in the lymphatic system, and they’ve been doing all sorts of modifications to the RNA payload (such as replacement of uridine with methylpseudouridine) to make it as non-immunogenic by itself as possible. The liposome lipids themselves are also chosen to be as non-immunogenic as possible, too – the coronavirus mRNA vaccines actually get an adjuvant boost from such properties, but you don’t want that in this case.

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#38

Post by belltaco »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #7

Great news! I wonder how much industry resistance there will be. Treating MS patients is a massive industry. Drug treatments are $100k a year currently, replacing that with a single $20 vaccine would be disruptive in the best way.

Where does it say it'd be only $20 ?

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#39

Post by chrizmatic »

NickM wrote: post #8

I've re-read the article a couple of times but I'm having trouble understanding how this works. I understand how an mRNA vaccine can teach the immune system to recognize a virus, but in the case of an autoimmune disorder, the challenge is to teach the immune system to stop attacking something, right? How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?

Guys, correct me if I'm wrong... NickM, you can understand mRNA in this case as a software/firmware update for an operating system to fix bugs. So you can basically teach the body that he is doing something wrong (e.g. autoimmune disease) and tada the body is not doing it anymore

Re: BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis

#40

Post by usrusr »

klmadfejno wrote: post #6

Can anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?

If this hit 20 years ago I suspect that we wouldn't have perceived anything but the tip of the iceberg of people who actually die or get close, because PCR was much less industrialized back then. And the big invisible "underwater part" of young or lucky people who don't get bad Covid but still serve the virus as transmitter relays would have made it a very strong, short wave. Likely mass graves in every part of the world, but mostly over I think by late summer 2020.

And so much individual suffering, because Covid deaths seem to be pretty far from peacefully dozing off. On this scale, which is orthogonal to all the usual metrics, I believe that it's considerably worse than 1918. If this virus had hit us before we got the tools for asymptomatic detection it would have likely lead to quite a few changes in our approach to end of life care, instead of the extra progress we now see in our utilization of the mRNA toolbox.

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