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.
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.
No one ever said "God wants me to have incurable tumors." It's always someone else who should suffer. This is the opposite of the early Christian message. I would almost say, if you are not helping people to the point of discomfort, you are missing the point of Christianity.
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.
I'm very anti-pharma myself (depression is not a chemical imbalance, and pills can't solve it. Changing lifestyle factors can.) but if your statement were true they wouldn't have made this vaccine in the first place.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.