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.”
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.
Oops, new to Lemmy. But not new to typing, so no excuse.
I meant than “it used to be”.
I blame autocorrect.
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.
Yeah you see this with a lot of monoclonal antibody treatments that private companies develop. They price them insanely high to recoup the insane research costs, a lot of them have reimbursement programs for patents who couldn’t afford to take the drug, or who’s insurance can’t cover all of the drug, because they want a patient base as it adds value for their product. What happens in sane countries is you have healthcare boards negotiating prices with drug manufacturers to bring the cost down, and insurance or public plans covering what the most long-term cost effective and beneficial treatments are. Drug companies want to recoup their costs sunk in to research, and they want a patient base that can affirm the validity of the product.
Where I have a major problem is when private companies benefit from publicly funded research, or for private drug manufacturers who are merely producing single-molecule or bio-similar compounds for generic labels. IMO generic drug production should be publicly owned, as should products developed using public research grants. I would also do away with private insurance and tax schemes and use market simulation models to determine costs and efficiencies within a publicly owned framework. Small private specialty clinics I would maintain as well as research grants to private research but bringing the drug to market would be socialized and the private research institution reimbursed through that. Any essential, standardized treatments, would effectively be delivered in a fully socialized way, with smaller specialty areas being more economically “free” but in service to the broader socialized model.
Personalized medicine is a way to rob you blind. Drugs cost unreal money. So does the hospital administration.
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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.
But isn’t personalized treatment kind of key to treating cancer?
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.
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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.
A healthy individual is more profitable, so as I said, a cure will be the best option - always.
And yes, it’s profitable. No ones talking about maximising it and collecting more tax. But it’s a great example on how Americans think.
So you are arguing the govt should run a profitable business?
Plus you can send a healthy individual back to
their families and into societywork again.This is how the US will use this.
And everywhere else let’s be honest…
True, except the US doesn’t even do that. It’s your fault for getting cancer, so you pay yourself. :))
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…
Right, we certainly can’t have more than one factor.
Worst take on Lemmy in 2024, already calling it now.
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.
Have you tried just going outside and NOT being depressed?
I did, and both going outside and choosing to not be depressed were important pieces to the puzzle that allowed me to move beyond depression.
“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
Fuck cancer, this sounds great!
Fuck cancer!
Fuck cancer! And fuck Spez!
Speaking of cancer…
I hope cancer gets cancer!
Fuck cancer
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 😅
cue antivaxxers’ pro-plague and pro-death screeching 🤦♂️
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.
“It’s God’s will!”
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.
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.
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.
Holy shit, this is a type of down to earth, factual and enlightening comment that we used to get in reddit! Thanks for this!
Thank you for the kind reaction.
I recently moved from Reddit to Lemmy (same username) and I took my comments with me.
Obligatory: username checks out
Seriously though, thank you!
edit …also: fuck cancer
Agreed. And I was happy the comment didn’t end with, “in 1998, Hell in a Cell…”.
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.
I think the first point to make is that this is not really the patient’s own genetic information, but that of their cancer, something they desperately want to get rid of. And the second point is that to my knowledge, there is no county on earth, where taking part in a clinical trial would not require the patient’s consent, which is to say, all people in the study were informed that the genetic sequences of their cancers will be analysed and used to generate a vaccine.
As for the potential to become a weapon, you would have to elaborate, because I really don’t see how the Moderna vaccine strategy could be weaponised.
If a mutation occurs making a cell cancerous then what has changed is human DNA. We’re creating technology that can turn immune systems against cells containing specific proteins in human DNA. I think curing cancer is good and maybe even necessary but if creating targets within human DNA is what Moderna is doing then it needs to be strictly controlled and regulated.
Here is a wild hypothetical for you: if you can target the parts of human DNA that make a cell cancerous then in theory you could target parts of DNA that make a person black or target cells in people with green eyes.
Of course it needs to be controlled and regulated. Like any other drugs. One of the reasons drugs are expensive is because there is so many regulatory hurdles that drug makes have to deal with before they can touch a patient.
I get your hypothetical, but it has two shortcomings. Firstly, training the immune system against cancer mutations is fairly easy, because the mutations are not present during the process of T and B cell maturation, so in the population of circulating naive T and B cells in a patient, there are likely to exist ones that are going to recognise the cancer antigen. Whatever proteins drive the dark pigmentation of skin or green eye colour will be used to drive the negative selection of T and B cells in the person with dark skin or brown eyes. And so, even if you administer a “vaccine” encoding these proteins, their immune systems will not be able to mount a response against them.
Secondly, what about the practicalities. Say you made the anti-green eye vaccine - how do you administer it to people? I’m assuming we’re not talking about some dystopian future where forcing people to receive injections that contain biologicals killing them is legal. It’s not the kind of “vaccine” that you could just spread in the air or add to drinking water for it to take effect.
I think far moreso than any other drug, regulations for drugs in the USA is shit. It needs to be regulated as if it were already a weapon.
Secondly, the nature of mRNA delivery through nanolipids opens up the possibility for oral delivery instead of only injection, a large amount of research is going into that.
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
what’s really cool is this plus telomerase will give the extremely wealthy a youth serum
FTFY
Uhh ohh, better raise the price then.
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.
You must not know how RNA works then or you would realize it is far safer than the old DNA vaccines.
I do. Still reminds me of that game even if I don’t think they are related concepts.
The only difference between an RNA vaccine and an old DNA vaccine is that the DNA vaccine is less efficient, more indirect, and makes you a little bit sick.
Ok… hooray?
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.
