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
Ew, I can feel myself getting healthier just parsing the word “u******l a***r”. You need to censor more of that.
I wonder if, even at this early stage of the therapy’s development, this would actually be more affordable than the alternative.
Melanoma patients are highly likely to have the cancer come back and or metastasize. Repeat treatments and hospitalizations are not cheap.
Which is why the Moderna vaccine will be priced at just 95% of the cost of the repeat treatments and hospitalization plus the value of the time saved and pain and suffering avoidance by the patient. Say, an extra half a million. I mean, what price would you put on avoiding seeing your parent or child subjected to round after round of chemotherapy?
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?
but sequencing and gene alteration is way cheaper than in[sic] needs to be.
…what? this sounds like you’re advocating for price increases.
It’s not better, ideally the body finds and eliminates cancer cells all by itself. Just like it does with viruses or infection. It happens all the time, most of the time you’d never know it happened
What this does is hardcore the “solution” into your immune cells. It tells them exactly what antibody to build, and spams that knowledge, so your immune cells are loaded up and ready to use that antibody
I think “reasonable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Whatever price they charge it will be to maximize to Moderna’s profits - i.e. they’ll price it slightly lower than what insurers / national health systems would be stung for what 44% of melanoma patients needing a second round of expensive chemo would cost them but not so high that no one will cover the treatment. So I guess the price is “reasonable”, in that it’ll be cheaper than the alternative but it’s not like Moderna will be charitable or fair about it.
It’s still an amazing breakthrough though.
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.
Multifactor analysis still requires an underlying commonality. People taking multiple drugs are all still taking the drug being trialed. You’re removing the confounding factors. If every treatment is a unique cancer protein there is no common factor. The treatment is the confounding factor.
To put it another way. A safety trial has to prove that any protein administered is safe.
Edit: just realised you’re probably talking about efficacy trials, whereas I’m more concerned with safety.
Personalized medicine is a way to rob you blind. Drugs cost unreal money. So does the hospital administration.
I worked for one the first hospitals that was doing genomic testing for oncology patients in the U.S. I am not advocating against genomic testing or precision medicine, but Amerisource Bergen, (at the time) McKesson, and the sales people at the manufacturer were licking their chops at the thought of precision medicine. It was extremely lucrative for some improvements on QoL. I sincerely hope that it’s not cost prohibitive to patients and results in breakthroughs in treatment. But I did watch as a lung cancer drug was administered to patients at the cost of 250k per treatment. I don’t remember how many treatments there were but the cost was insane. The US system of healthcare is absolutely broken and I believe there’s a study that particularly evaluated cancer as a major cause of families depleting whatever savings they had within a couple years of being diagnosed. This is an indictment of the whole system. Not the efficacy of the drugs.
Most modern cancer drug treatment is sequenced to at least the specific proteins of the type of cancer it is.
Have breast cancer? Cool. We figure out which of the many variations so that we can give you medications for that exact type of breast cancer.
This sort of specific targeting has been increasing and increasing for the last 20 years. MRNA is the next step of that and is highly likely to be a means or become or for treatments in many other areas.
Time for the antivax doomsday cult to extol the virtues of cancer.
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.
True. My point is that when healthcare is socialised, the government will be the one having to budget the cost/benefit.
Meaning a cure will always be the most profitable, meaning we will see this for all citizens fast.
Not the most profitable… The least expensive, long term. The most profitable would be the cheapest option but the most possible tax is collected. The whole point is to reduce burden on the tax payers, not maximize tax revenue.
Plus you can send a healthy individual back to
their families and into societywork again.
This is how the US will use this.
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.
Pharma employees are famously not people who themselves or whose loved ones can also be affected by cancer…
The reason your healthcare sucks in the us is the insurance industry mate…
could have been an attempt at irony
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.
A bit oversimplified but generally true for persistent bummed out. Not true for acute suicideation, which is real, a threat, and can be resolved with drugs or listening to the suicide call.
“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
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.
Does anyone know yet if long COVID is an auto-immune disease? I only assume it is but otherwise don’t know.
I just found a paper in trying to figure this out, but it seems like the author of this study wasn’t really looking at it as an autoimmune disease, but a post-viral syndrome like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) which is partially immunological, but not autoimmune. ME/CFS has been known about a lot longer than long COVID, and seems to be better (if not yet well) understood.
Reading though a lot of the sites with information on ME/CFS, it makes intuitive sense that long COVID has more in common with it than something like rheumatoid arthritis. I hope that long COVID brings attention to ME/CFS, or in studying similar diseases we’re able to learn more about their common causes/treatments, or generally understand both better.
All I heard overpandemic was that COVID was triggering diabetes in people which makes sense because we don’t know what triggers diabetes but one of the theories is it’s caused by viral stress.
I bet any money they will one day find a genetic mutation like the one in BRCA2 that causes cancer.
Fuck cancer, this sounds great!
