Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought
Adding Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine to a standard melanoma treatment dramatically reduces the risk of death or recurrence.
The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens on their cancer cells.
That’s pretty dope
You mispelled "expensive."
It'll be reasonably expensive, but sequencing and gene alteration is way cheaper than in needs to be.
If this can actually cure cancers, it may even be worth it.
The thing is, surely there's antibody against cancer antigens anyway, in ordinary cancer. A cancer cell expresses epitopes not on healthy cells.
Why is this better?
You pay tax. Tax is for roads, schools, and hospitals. Why don't you get healed when you're sick? Because you're a sucker, bro.
Also sounds very hard to do a proper controlled trial on. Every treatment produces a different protein, so there's no consistent factor to test except for the delivery mechanism.
There's still ways but not trivial. You have to do multifactor analysis, but it's gonna have a ton of noise unless you have a large sample of different people with recurring "neoantigens". It's similar to how drug side effects are tracked for people who take multiple medicines, you compare against populations which share different combinations of the same factors.
Time for the antivax doomsday cult to extol the virtues of cancer.
god wants the children to have incurable tumors
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
You should inject bleach using a flash light.
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
In my day Laetrile was the quack conservative medicine for cancer.
it's naaatural
Guys, just look at the economy! Infinite, uninhibited growth is a GOOD THING!!!!
It's just a cold.
This is amazing news for countries with free healthcare! Even though the vaccine is expensive, it's nowhere as expensive as the care a cancer patient needs today.
Plus you can send a healthy individual back to their families and into society again.
It's not free, it's socialized. This means expenses are passed to the tax payers. But like you said, if it lowers costs long term, it's worth the short term cost increase.
United States are in the same group as China, Yemen and Syria on this one.
The shareholders of the pharma-industry will not be happy. You have to manage a disease, not heal it; that would be detrimental for the balance sheet.
And unhappy shareholders of big pharma is definitely not what we want; if they are happy, we will be happy.
They'll have to fight the shareholders of the health insurance industry, who don't want to pay for a long-term condition
“We think that in some countries the product could be launched under accelerated approval by 2025.”
Thats literally next year. That's amazing.
Can't wait to see what other uses we can find for mRNA
Cure for auto immune diseases is incoming FWIW
I wish. My kids are coeliac i.e., the presence of gluten in food causes the body to attack its own gut.
I'd love if there were a vaccine that they could take once, or even every several months that would let them eat what they wanted. It would have to be something that either turns off the errant immune response altogether or teaches the body to tolerate / ignore gluten proteins.
You know what this sounds like to me?
Like Moderna is gonna ask $10k a poke.
Edit: ITT: Pharma bros telling me how awesome artificially-inflated medication prices are.
In this case, you have to develop an individual vaccine for every patient based on the DNA from their own cancer. That’s actually a lot of work. $10K a poke is very reasonable given that you could easily spend 10 or 100 times that on conventional treatment.
Okay but forcing someone to pay you $550k (averaging your values) to not die maybe is still incredibly fucking awful, so it's really not hard to be better than that.
I can respect that developing a personalized vaccine might take a lot of work but I'm not a chemist. I don't know how much work it actually takes, nor do I know how many vaccines a person would realistically need to cure their cancer be it stage 1 up to stage 4?
What I do know is that if this vaccine ends up being more effective than the traditional method then it is a wonderful discovery, but if it leads to life-long medical debt and subsequent financial ruin all the same your life is still fucked.. I guess I'd rather be poor and alive, but I'd also rather not be destitute.
Damn you weren't kidding about the Pharma Bros. The fuckin Tankies are glad to not be the dumbasses in thread for once
When it's inevitably going to be a lot less than that, will you eat your words?
As soon as you stop eating that pharma boot, homie.
The article suggests the vaccine prevents the recurrence of a specific cancer by 44% vs conventional treatment alone. So let's be pessimists and say it only prevents recurrence by 22%. Should we eat our words that still 1/5th of people who'd otherwise die or suffer horribly from a recurring cancer now don't?
I think I would be more skeptical of the eventual price of this treatment and less about its effectiveness.
LOL I just remembered that some folks in the anti-covid-vax/maga category have been referring to the mRNA covid vaccines as 'the cancer vaccines' based on disinformation that they would 'interact with your genes' and 'give you cancer in 2 years'
Seeing this headline [Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought] I had to look to see if it was the cancer-targeting vaccine or some mouth-breathers talking about the covid ones 😅
I'm going to preface this by saying I had the moderna series and all boosters. Also had COVID once, ironically the weekend before Id scheduled a booster. I entirely believe that the vaccine is effective at reducing infection rates and severity.
have been referring to the mRNA covid vaccines as 'the cancer vaccines'
Ironic, because they literally started as "cancer vaccines", literally a niche cancer treatment. When they were first approved in 2008.
based on disinformation that they would 'interact with your genes' and 'give you cancer in 2 years'
We really don't know the long term consequences of mRNA vaccines. The COVID vaccine is the first application of them at large scale, and the first application of them where we'd normally expect most recipients to still be alive and mostly healthy ten years down the road (again, because they were originally created as a cancer treatment).
Check in in 2030 and we'll know whether or not we made a good bet on that one. We probably did, but there's a reason the manufacturers were given immunity from liability for anything that comes of the COVID vaccines.
There is a common misconception that long term effects will manifest long after the injection. All vaccines with longterm effects manifested their effect shortly after the injection. It makes little sense that you will have adverse reactions months or years later because the compounds are long gone from your system.
There was also the misconception that the vaccine was rushed and that steps were skipped or shortened during testing. That is not the case. The administrative processes were prioritized and there was a huge amount of test candidates so testing could be done much quicker. The normal process is not longer because they want to gather more long term data but because it just takes longer to gather it.
We really don't know the long term consequences of mRNA vaccines.
We know they are way safer than the old DNA vaccines because they don't literally give you a small dose of the virus like the old vaccines.
cue antivaxxers' pro-plague and pro-death screeching 🤦♂️
Any day now those vaxxed will drop dead!!
Haha, but if we do, they will follow in a gross and painful fashion:
In Canada, 83% of the population received at least one dose. I believe we are 39M 40M now (lol, I was sleeping).
So 6,800,000 gonna keep the electricity going; grow and process food; and perform medical procedures? --Oh wait, all the medical people are dead. Speaking of dead, there aren't any firemen to dispose of the 33,200,000 bodies! Damn, biohazard everywhere. I'm assuming their edjumacashun didn't be gud, so I'm not hopeful of their prospects for rebuilding, but I suspect rage will take out who is left before it gets to that point anyways.
Edit: Math is hard
Well if we wait long enough, they will! See! We were right all along!
"It's God's will!"
I was browsing LinkedIn before Christmas and a person popped up in my feed who spent the entire pandemic over on Twitter posting misinformation. This POS dressed up the misinfo as if it were science & statistics even though it was obviously distorted and cherry picked nonsense. He had hundreds of thousands of followers so I think it is reasonable to assume people died as a result of his garbage.
In the UK there is a law called the Cancer Act which was enacted in the 30s to ban advertising or selling of quack cures for cancer and give some means to prosecute offenders. I really wish that act were modernised to ban advertisement or promotion of quackery for any disability, chronic / terminal condition or contagious disease.
I wonder if my mom will accept this vaccine for her cancer after years of believing all the conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine. I’m willing to bet that if she has the opportunity, she’ll jump on it.
Out of curiosity, how do you think she'll rationalize it?
I don’t think she will other than that it might save her life. She’ll live with the dissonance, which as an evangelical Christian is nothing new for her.
Can't wait for it to be specifically priced for only the 1% to be able to afford. Just like all the other cancer drugs that work.
It’s for rich folk. Not for us poors. Elysium.
Why be that cynical about it? All technology is only for the rich when it's first introduced.
I don't believe I'm being cynical, I think I'm being realistic.
Recall that the formula for insulin was given for free to the university of toronto and now most people in the USA cannot afford insulin even though the cost of creation has not changed since the 1950's.
It was only extremely recently that 35 dollar insulin became available in the USA and that's still obscenely overpriced.
Reference: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country
I never once thought about it before but how do they select a target antigen for what is effectively a human cell? Maybe they could take a similar approach to Rabies or Prion Disease.
The target antigens are from human cells, but they are human cells that mutated and hence became cancerous. What Moderna does, is it takes DNA from these cells, sequences it and finds where exactly the mutations occurred. A mutation means that there is a different sequence of amino acids in a protein, which in effect makes it a new and distinct antigen. This way, they select antigens that are present in the melanoma cells, but not in normal cells of the body. Then they take these mutated sites and use them to generate mRNA that will encode them all, be used to synthesise these mutated antigens, and train the immune system to react to them as alien antigens. The treatment described in this article is a combination of the mRNA vaccine with Keytruda, which is a cancer therapy based on an antibody. The antibody targets a protein from the PD-1 / PD-L1 axis. This axis is used by normal cells to tell the immune system not to attack those cells, because they are body's own cells. Cancer cells often mutate like crazy, but then exploit this PD-1 / PD-L1 axis basically to say to the immune system "nothing to see here".
As for Rabies, I think we already have pretty well working vaccines, so we're not really in a dire need for new ones.
As for prions, it would be tricky. The reason prions do what they do is not that they are mutated proteins, but misfolded proteins. This is to say they assume the wrong shape, even though the sequence of amino acids in them is the same as in the healthy version of the protein. And this in turn means that they were synthesised based on a healthy, unmutated version of mRNA. And this in turn means that there is no mutation that the Moderna vaccine strategy could employ to train the immune system to recognise that prion protein.
It's not necessarily impossible to target prions but it doesn't seem trivial. The reason they're dangerous is specifically the incorrect shape because that shape changes interaction behavior with other biological molecules, and immune cells could theoretically test for that change in interaction. But that's more complicated than regular molecule recognition which immune cells normally do. There's probably research in trying to make immune cells handle that too, but I haven't seen any articles about it.
Just on the rabies bit, there has been a couple of trials using mRNA vaccines on rabies. They've shown promise as they have been shown to be quite effective, and the current rabies vaccines we have are expensive and time consuming to make.
Yes.
What you proposed just doesn't feel like the sort of thing we've come to expect from modern medical research, if it was outright targeting selective genetic information then it would be banned in many many countries, and maybe it should be just for it's potential to become a weapon. No other commercially available mRNA Vaccines ever touched human DNA in that manner. It has always been some other protein structure to be identified by the immune system.
BioNTech is doing something similar. Their approach (and likely also Moderna's approach) works by first identifying mutations in protein coding genes in the cancer cells. Then, they target the resulting mutated protein (that is distinct from the same protein in non-cancer calls) with their vaccines.
what's really cool is this plus telomerase will give us a youth serum
Here's the thing: we're not getting many people to the natural limits of the human body's age much less working out ways to go past that.
Jeanne Louise Calment was 122 when she died. There's a hypothesis that she switched identities with her mother at some point, but most scientists who study aging don't consider it credible. Many other supercentenarian claims don't hold up; they often come from places that had bad record keeping a century ago, and they just forget how many birthdays they've had. 115 seems the typical limit for most people, but even that might have very few legit claims.
There are so few people who make it that far that they're basically rounding error even when including incorrect claims. Monaco has the highest average life expectancy at 87. We should be able to add almost 30 more years to that before we even talk about extraordinary youth serums.
Better cancer treatments will be part of getting us there, but far from the only factor.
telomeres are cells' biological clock... they get shorter with each division, and is the general cause of your body breaking down, round the 80's.
telomerase and other chemicals can reset those telomeres, but also cause the body's existing precancerous cells to go malignant. (telomeres also limit cancer cell growth, and creating telomerase is one of the mutations required for full on cancer)
so, if we can regrow cells telomeres without causing cancer... we have a youth serum.
but there's already other telomerase gene therapy in development anyways...
One of the "blue zones" (places with long lives) famously had:
So lots of 40 year olds in 1940 suddenly claimed to be and were recorded as 60. Then in 2000 100 (80), then in 2020 120 (100)
So what appeared to be exceptional lifespans were really just fraud
Though our telomere limit appears to be 120 or so, so maybe some are trying the truth
How so? Cancer is something that one would be statistically likely to get eventually if you didn't first die of anything else I suppose, so it'd certainly be useful in extending effective lifespan if you already had a youth serum, but how would a treatment for cancer do anything for other age related disease?
You get cancer all the time your body has natural mechanisms of finding and breaking down the cancerous cells. As we age some of these mechanisms start to falter, cells divide, but small errors over time accumulate.
A youth serum is really not the goal, the goal is fixing errors in these systems, maintaining current functions and creating a new mechanism.
This would work like a booster for this mechanisms and effectively make it possible to maintain and improve these systems. The side effect being an increase lifespan to some degree.
I suppose this I just the cancer component, but several other things are still needed on the field of longevity research for a “youth serum” to be viable.
I hope so much that this isn't a predecessor to this.
An immediate red flag:
"Now if you replace that man with a cop ..... 🤷 ... the picture changes"
Lol look at this fake leftist pretending to hate cops
No, but it gives you autism though /s
Uhh ohh, better raise the price then.
The article doesn't go into much in the way of details, so I can't begin to say how it might extend into the treatment of other cancers, but it does make it clear that this treatment is specifically for melanoma only. Which is great--it's a deadly cancer. But without more information, we shouldn't get too excited about this being able to treat other types of cancer.
I would be extremely surprised if this approach only worked for melanoma. I expect this is just the first cancer type they've tried applying it to. Some excitement is warranted here, IMO.
IDK, after that I took two doses of Pfizer vaccine (which is a mRNA vaccine) I started to show some heart issues that I never had in my life. I'm even seeing a cardiologist. I'm not trying to be anti-vaccine but I admit that after that I am afraid of mRNA vaccines.
This will save a lot of lives in Australia and NZ. Melanoma is our bi-national cancer. Thanks, CFCs!
I got a ping off anxiety thinking about 'One Chance' the game where the end of the world was caused by exactly this, more specifically the end of all life.
Ok… hooray?
I've heard this one before...
Safe and effective
During the little flu virus, whenever there would occur a yet new bunch of deaths due to hear attack, many newspapers would claim "You've seen this? And this proves that our magical Vxx works!". Yes, it does. However, it depends on what you mean by "works", for whom and for what goal. The same in this case.