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seems like Covid might end up having a WWII like impact on some technologies. Tons of accelerated R&D triggered by a massive crisis. Would be nice if we could salvage something good out of a bad situation
We usually do!
Hunger, sabre-tooth tigers, malaria, war: everything seems to make civilization stronger in the end
The very definition of survivorship bias :)
IIRC the 14th century was particularly disastrous with both the great famine and the black death wiping out something like 40% and 30% of the population of Europe. In the 17th century the thirty years' war (and associated famines and outbreaks) was similarly devastating.
The survivors had more wealth however.
The mRNA research was already very well underway before the pandemic. In fact the COVID vaccines were low hanging fruit.
I would imagine there's a lot more capital going around in that industry now though :)
How long before they would have been commercialized without an epidemic?
Now, is there people greedy enough to start a pandemic or allow it to occur, to accelerate the pay off of this new technology? (I guess there is financial and medical technology incentives to accelerate mRNA technology)
Why are you so sure about that? From what I saw in last year’s Moderna presentation on R&D day they ramped up vaccines for other infections _because_ it worked so well for COVID, but they were focusing more on therapeutics before, as they thought there’s more money in it and less in preventing infections with vaccines.
So you are saying that one way to solve a problem quick is to create a pandemic around it ... hmm
I think the most important takeaway from the pandemic is that accelerated phase 2/3 trials will become the norm
I don’t think that’s what he/she is saying. How did you infer that?
What he’s/she’s saying is how to make the best out of a crisis after the fact.
My understanding is that the only reason this worked for mRNA is that it was basically already at the end point of the development cycle of figuring out which disease to apply it to. It was just waiting for patients to demonstrate efficacy and safety. COVID-19 provided that opportunity. This is not a repeatable model for other new technologies though. Now that mRNA safety has been proven out, the hurdles to applying it to other things are drastically reduced (as they would have been once the first mRNA drug got approved).
Similarly, having a ready population pool and an urgent need is not likely to come up again although maybe mRNA drugs in general have a safety profile that might warrant giving them to patients who have no other alternative.
It should probably be noted here that for the mRNA vaccines, the only reason that the trials seemed accelerated is that they were able to find so many infected participants, and so were able to reach their stated endpoints more quickly.
This is not the same thing as the BioNTech/ModeRNA treatment. This is gene therapy on T-cells. The mRNA is used here to produce a functional protein within the T-cells themselves, not a protein to recognize and attack.
Its insane how powerful and complex the immune system is, it is nowhere nearly fully understood. It can fire against anything detected to be hostile, false alarms causing auto immune diseases. Being able to take snippets of something, e.g. any cancera person gets and telling it "fight" would be the holy grail :)
Everyone seems to be commenting "cancer vaccine" but the article is talking about a treatment
It's like a vaccine in that it is using/stimulating the immune system to target the cancer.
It seems like you really could vaccinate someone against their future cancer using this, assuming you had a time machine and a tumor sample.
Why not have:
1) One of those new blood tests that can detect XX number of cancers before any other type of screening
2) Synthesize MRNa vaccine against the detected cancer type to kill it early?
Not trying to be cheeky: How many millions of citizens here in the U.S. will abstain from a potential cancer vaccine if based off this research? Would the same religious/tribal objections be held, for example, if the disease to be prevented was cancer vs a virus of unknown origin? Would it still be viewed by so many as a political/big-pharma conspiracy ("But where did the cancer come from?" etc.)?
Cynical me says it would.
I think that's less problematic as you can't infect someone with cancer if you have it. But my guess is you are right. Although I will say that suspicious people are occasionally right. Trusting science has a proven track record, but it doesn't have a 100% shooting percentage, so I would be ok with not having a debate there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devil_facial_tumour_disease
You can't infect anyone yet, at least
You’re right. If science was never questioned, you would still be drinking cocaine, giving your kids cough syrup laced with heroin, spraying people with DDT, and smoking the cigarette brand your doctor recommended.
If it demonstrably cures diagnosed cancer I think most people will not hesitate, especially for cancers that have a high mortality and/or few other treatment options.
If it's proposed as a vaccine for cancer that you don't have yet, there would be more hesitancy.
The HPV vaccine is proven to prevent cervical, throat, and other cancers. Uptake outside of a few developed countries is woefully low considering the benefit.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009174352...
There is a cancer vaccine (HPV) for cervical cancers. Its a touchy subject but reports are vaccinations are declining.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/13/well/live/hpv-vaccine-chi...
"that parental intent not to vaccinate their adolescents against HPV rose from 50.4 percent in 2012 to 64 percent in 2018. Many parents resisted the vaccine despite their doctors’ recommendations, Dr. Sonawane said. Ironically, parents were most resistant — at 68.1 percent — to vaccinating girls, the very group for whom this vaccine was initially developed to prevent cervical cancer."
https://www.cdc.gov/hpv/parents/vaccine-for-hpv.html
When in a doctors office with a cancer diagnosis, people will take it.
When the research showed it was useful for men (in both self- and other-protection regards), it was still not an easy task to get my doctor to prescribe it for me. Zero hesitation on my part to get it, even with the extremely high price tag.
I got it for my daughter the instant she was eligible last year, because cervical cancer is awful and it seemed stupid not to.
My experience suggests that it was something the doctor's office wasn't actively pushing -- they made it known that it was available without me having to ask, but it was presented very much as a "do you want to?" thing, rather than as part of the "of course you'll be getting this" set of earlier vaccines.
Then it was sort of a pain to actually get, because it required an extra doctor visit for the second shot in the series.
I can see all that adding up to hurting uptake.
> When in a doctors office with a cancer diagnosis, people will take it.
That's a bit late.
Men too :)
HPV is most commonly known for being a cause of cervical cancer, but it can lead to other sorts of cancer that men are also prone to. HPV vaccines are good for everyone!
People have a belief that they can just tough out COVID, and so the vaccine is a long-term-risk tradeoff: suffer unknown side-effects of the vaccine, or maybe die of this disease that my friend had and recovered from?
This immunotherapy is cotemporal with "traditional" immunological and chemo treatments, so the mortality calculus is different: "Suffer potential unknown side-effects of an mRNA therapy or content myself with that 'three months' number the doctor gave me?"
> Not trying to be cheeky: How many millions of citizens here in the U.S. will abstain from a potential cancer vaccine if based off this research? Would the same religious/tribal objections be held, for example, if the disease to be prevented was cancer vs a virus of unknown origin? Would it still be viewed by so many as a political/big-pharma conspiracy ("But where did the cancer come from?" etc.)?
So this misses the full Covid-19 vaccine critique and provides a disturbing slant instead of the proposed hazards. The specific critique is that the protein chosen in C19 vaccines is in fact dangerous in its own right.
mRNA as a mechanism of delivering a protein to the body is anything but an empirical debate -- the tech works, and works decently well for risk profiles who have no other option. The philosophical / duty of care debate is whether or not the risks associated with mRNA therapies / vaccines are worth the inherent risks.
Equating Covid 19 for the common person as the same as cancer for the common person doesn't appear to balance. If C19 had cancer mortality rates, this pandemic would look drastically different -- with far few people in the room.
I tend to think the abstinence rate would be much lower than with the vaccine.
Cancer scares people in a way that COVID doesn't.
Many of the anti-vaxxers do not perceive COVID as a credible risk, so they let their contrarian/anti-authoritarian/"don't tell me what to do" instincts kick in, because none of it actually matters to them in their mind.
When faced with a form of cancer that has a <10% survival rate they will shut up and take the mRNA treatment in a heartbeat.
So we'll have a group of people who suffer from cancer and those who don't. Natural selection it would seem.
I personally don't know anyone that abstains from MMR/polio/chickenpox vaccines. I think this whole anti-anti-vaxxer meme has really got people riled up and ignoring just how many people are already taking vaccines. over 92% of kids have 3 doses of polio vaccine by the time they're 24 months according to the CDC. Something tells me that number gets much higher with just another year or two.
It's a sad day for honest debate when being skeptical of an item gets you labeled as being "anti" an entire category of things to which that item belongs.
To be clear I don't think your question is expressly stating that anti-vaxxers are a big concern, but if there's a genuine concern that a vaccine is well established to work, an incredibly large majority of people take it in the U.S. so I don't think the concern is warranted.
People turn to pseudo-scientific stuff as a last resort (or the only) as well, so I would not necessarily say they would not get the vaccine if it might be their last hope.
There are 2 main differences
1. This is article is describing a therapy, not prevention. Your sensibilities will be influenced if you already have a deadly illness.
2. This would be a choice and not a mandate, like chemotherapy is today. Or at least I imagine it would be.
I'm sure many anti vaxxers who've died from covid would've accepted the vaccine on their death beds if it improved their chances of fighting the disease at that point.
It depends 100% on if the conservative media and figureheads like Trump think they can make hay out of turning any given medical treatment into a way to oppose liberals. Let's hope they can't.
As someone who is very anti-COVID vaccinations, my problem with it isn't the vaccine itself or the underlying technology so much as it's been the plethora of other issues associated with it. The normal processes for drug approval were bypassed and so as a result we have very limited safety data and no long-term >5yr safety data at all.
With something like this, I would expect it to go through those trials and see that we'd have some sort of safety data and further research.
Again, I am actually very positive about mRNA therapies—I just want them to be fully tested and vetted first.
Is this treatment going to be mandatory?
I hope so! ~50% of people in a developed country get cancer within their lifetime and they cost our healthcare system the most (other than, err, very sick elderly people).
If this works safely and reliably, then this is like doubling or 5x'ing our healthcare budget over 5 years.
I wouldn't mind if people could opt-out of mRNA cancer treatment, but then they have to pay for every other cancer treatment option (and all doctor visits) out of pocket.
According to CDC ( https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/about/costs/index.htm ):
>Obesity affects 19% of children and 42% of adults, putting people at risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. Over a quarter of all Americans 17 to 24 years are too heavy to join the military. Obesity costs the US health care system $147 billion a year.
Would slimming medication (meth) mandates be reasonable too or should a doctor consultation be necessary beforehand? To assess the risk of slimming down too fast, pre existing conditions, et cetera.
What is the news here? Also what's the difference between this and Moderna's personalised cancer vaccine?
I think the news is the fact that a non-profit, non-affiliated (w/ Moderna) organization has additional supporting evidence for mRNA therapy for cancer patients who weren't responding to treatment otherwise.
Not every piece of news needs to shake the world to the core.
it could be that this is public research vs private?
It's quite exciting to see this scientific discovery having such widespread use, don't you agree? The research is around the [NKG7 protein][1], not sure what Moderna targets.
[1]: https://cancerimmunolres.aacrjournals.org/content/early/2021...
My thoughts exactly. According to the Moderna pipeline [0], they're already on phase II trials for their cancer vaccine, which to me seems much more exciting than a proof-of-concept if that's what this is.
This is a treatment, not a vaccine, so it's something you use after you get cancer instead of something you take to prevent you from getting it.