Individually tailored cancer vaccines would be so unbelievably cool. I really hope this comes to fruition.
This is the idea behind BioNTech’s cancer-immunotherapy research. It works something like this: For each cancer patient, BioNTech takes a tissue sample from a tumor to perform a genetic analysis. Based on that test, the company designs an individually tailored mRNA vaccine, which tells the patient’s cells to produce proteins associated with that specific tumor’s specific mutation. The immune system learns to search-and-destroy similar tumor cells throughout the body.
[...]
The company is currently in clinical trials for personalized vaccines in “basically every solid cancer,” she said, including melanoma, breast cancer, and ovarian cancer.
Individually tailored cancer vaccines would be so unbelievably cool. I really hope this comes to fruition.
It really would be. The thing I love to point out when talking to friends and family about pandemic/vaccine/etc is that on TV there's the trope in a lot of shows where in some episode there's some...
It really would be. The thing I love to point out when talking to friends and family about pandemic/vaccine/etc is that on TV there's the trope in a lot of shows where in some episode there's some kind of horrible disease that the Main Character(s) contract, and the intrepid doctor manages to synthesize a vaccine/cure in mere hours and save everyone by the end of the episode. Which everyone realizes is completely unrealistic.
Except we basically did that. The mRNA vaccine was designed and created in less than a week from when they got the DNA sequence of the virus. All the rest was safety checks and scaling to multi-billion dose manufacturing and distribution. If we lived in a TV world, they would have said "but we've got to SAVE the PEOPLE doctor, damn the risks!" and just given to everyone, and the world would have been saved at the 40min mark.
Good article talking about the road to mRNA vaccines and its potential future.
Good article talking about the road to mRNA vaccines and its potential future.
The triumph of mRNA, from backwater research to breakthrough technology, is not a hero’s journey, but a heroes’ journey. Without Katalin Karikó’s grueling efforts to make mRNA technology work, the world would have no Moderna or BioNTech. Without government funding and philanthropy, both companies might have gone bankrupt before their 2020 vaccines. Without the failures in HIV-vaccine research forcing scientists to trailblaze in strange new fields, we might still be in the dark about how to make the technology work. Without an international team of scientists unlocking the secrets of the coronavirus’s spike protein several years ago, we might not have known enough about this pathogen to design a vaccine to defeat it last year. mRNA technology was born of many seeds.
RTS,S is the first, and to date, the only vaccine that has demonstrated it can significantly reduce malaria, and life-threatening severe malaria, in young African children.
Among children aged 5–17 months who received 4 doses of RTS,S, the vaccine prevented approximately 4 in 10 (39%) cases of malaria over 4 years of follow-up and about 3 in 10 (29%) cases of severe malaria, ** with significant reductions also seen in overall hospital admissions as well as in admissions due to malaria or severe anaemia. The vaccine also reduced the need for blood transfusions, which are required to treat life-threatening malaria anaemia by 29%.
Individually tailored cancer vaccines would be so unbelievably cool. I really hope this comes to fruition.
It really would be. The thing I love to point out when talking to friends and family about pandemic/vaccine/etc is that on TV there's the trope in a lot of shows where in some episode there's some kind of horrible disease that the Main Character(s) contract, and the intrepid doctor manages to synthesize a vaccine/cure in mere hours and save everyone by the end of the episode. Which everyone realizes is completely unrealistic.
Except we basically did that. The mRNA vaccine was designed and created in less than a week from when they got the DNA sequence of the virus. All the rest was safety checks and scaling to multi-billion dose manufacturing and distribution. If we lived in a TV world, they would have said "but we've got to SAVE the PEOPLE doctor, damn the risks!" and just given to everyone, and the world would have been saved at the 40min mark.
Good article talking about the road to mRNA vaccines and its potential future.
Also, I didn't know the state of malaria vaccines was this dysmal.
https://www.who.int/news-room/q-a-detail/malaria-vaccine-implementation-programme