BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis(fiercebiotech.com) |
BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis(fiercebiotech.com) |
I'm really glad that it's finally come to fruition, but I definitely feel a bit of regret that I have come to embody the "ideas are cheap, execution matters" truism.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200128054759/https://biontech....
From Notes on Technology in the 2020s - Eli Dourado
That's a bit like saying containers haven't provided meaningful economic contribution because consumers don't use them very often.
How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget" something that it thinks is harmful?
The greatest advancement with mRNA is that you can have a vaccine in under a month. But that doesn't help if for each new mRNA encoding you need 9 months worth of health & safety trials.
You can get fast tracked if you show superior effectiveness, meet an unmet medical need, or get rid of serious side effects of an existing therapy. We should look at ways to speed up this process, (in the grand scheme of things 9 months isn't that long to wait to cure a disease) not eliminate it altogether. If we approved something that actually does harm, it will further undermine efforts to widely vaccinate the public. We already have issues with people trusting vaccines when there is no evidence of negative effects, I can't imagine how hard it would be if we had another thalidomide on our hands.
true, but there are loopholes. the 510(k) loophole for medical devices where any device that is "substantially equivalent" to an existing approved device can get fast track approval has proved problematic. this has been publicly documented both in the press and in independent documentaries for some time.
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-submissions/pr...
I think originally BioNTech worked on cancer treatments.
It seems backwards... Covid-19 vaccine is an instance of this technology, the technology is not a derivative of what they did in Covid-19 vaccine.
As far as _why_ that works instead of sending someone into anaphylactic shock... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ The immune system is weird and complex, and I guess that's why they want a medical specialist around in case you're one of the unlucky ones. (Only the first time with sublingual tablets as far as I know)
To quote:
One goal has been to try to selectively affect autoreactive T cells, but that’s a lot easier said than done. The regulatory T cells and regulatory B cells are key players in immune tolerance, the “friend or foe” recognition system that keeps our own immune systems from attacking everything in sight. If you could present some of the antigens involved to those cells in a way that they accepted them as normal human proteins rather than as an external threat, you could presumably turn down their response.
BioNTech and others have been trying to target the population of lymphoid antigen-presenting cells, known to be very important in immune tolerance mechanisms, but without setting off any of the general inflammation pathways. They have a liposomal formulation that when injected into the muscle tissue seems to end up almost entirely in the lymphatic system, and they’ve been doing all sorts of modifications to the RNA payload (such as replacement of uridine with methylpseudouridine) to make it as non-immunogenic by itself as possible. The liposome lipids themselves are also chosen to be as non-immunogenic as possible, too – the coronavirus mRNA vaccines actually get an adjuvant boost from such properties, but you don’t want that in this case.
If I understand correctly, it gets the cells to produce the same autoantigen that they are misidentifying, which causes them to slow that activity.
It sounds like they are creating large quantities of the "offending" protein via the vaccine mNRA mechanism in normal cells. Normally the antibodies/T-cells would attack the myelin coating of nerves and the brain but with the protein being abundantly available anywhere the immune cells are "kept occupied" and leave nerves and brain alone.
If this treatment works as I understand, you would need continuous refreshers each time the mRNA injection is depleted.
And so much individual suffering, because Covid deaths seem to be pretty far from peacefully dozing off. On this scale, which is orthogonal to all the usual metrics, I believe that it's considerably worse than 1918. If this virus had hit us before we got the tools for asymptomatic detection it would have likely lead to quite a few changes in our approach to end of life care, instead of the extra progress we now see in our utilization of the mRNA toolbox.
There is evidence that obesity and other lifestyle are making Covid-19 worse than it could have been.
But we'll ignore and just enable a continuely growing health problem of obesity.
The COVID IFR is known to be lower than that of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed between 50 and 100 million people in less than a year, and pulled that off at a time when the Earth's population was a quarter of what it is today and much less mobile. I have no idea whatsoever where you get the idea that COVID is worse than 1918. It most emphatically (at least so far) is not at all showing itself to be as bad, let alone worse.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...
Sounds great, until the insurance companies figured out that the best way to make more profit with this profit cap is to pay out more and increase the premiums accordingly. [1] Obviously, the hospitals don't mind that either.
[0] https://www.healthcare.gov/health-care-law-protections/rate-...
[1] https://www.aeaweb.org/research/regulating-health-insurers-a...
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-selection.htm#:~:tex....
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/how-fluvaccine-made.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4947948/#irv123...