Time for the antivax doomsday cult to extol the virtues of cancer.
Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought
Submitted 10 months ago by sanqueue@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.freethink.com/health/cancer-vaccine
Comments
Blackmist@feddit.uk 10 months ago
KreekyBonez@lemmy.world 10 months ago
god wants the children to have incurable tumors
SeeJayEmm@lemmy.procrastinati.org 10 months ago
I mean don’t people already spout this crap?
KevonLooney@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
SocialMediaRefugee@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
groupofcrows@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
You should inject bleach using a flash light.
btaf45@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
In my day Laetrile was the quack conservative medicine for cancer.
banneryear1868@lemmy.world 10 months ago
it’s naaatural
occhionaut@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Guys, just look at the economy! Infinite, uninhibited growth is a GOOD THING!!!
garymcm@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It just a cold.
themurphy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
BlueBockser@programming.dev 10 months ago
Idk man that sounds pretty communist to me
espentan@lemmy.world 10 months ago
A country, looking after its people?! Get that communism outta here!
halm@leminal.space 10 months ago
I know, right? It’s almost like communism is a good idea or something.
grayman@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
themurphy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
littlebluespark@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Plus you can send a healthy individual back to
their families and into societywork again.This is how the US will use this.
DeuxChevaux@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
kameecoding@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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…
themurphy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Worst take on Lemmy in 2024, already calling it now.
GardeningSadhu@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
They’ll have to fight the shareholders of the health insurance industry, who don’t want to pay for a long-term condition
1984@lemmy.today 10 months ago
United States are in the same group as China and Syria on this one.
Ganbat@lemmyonline.com 10 months ago
You know what this sounds like to me?
Like Moderna is gonna ask $10k a poke.
mriguy@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Goblin_Mode@ttrpg.network 10 months ago
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.
IHadTwoCows@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Fortunately both Musk and Bezoa will be safe from cancer instead of all those thousands of Mozarts they told us about
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months ago
Oh, what villains! Developing a cure for cancer and asking for ten thousand dollars for it!
In terms of cancer treatment, do you have any idea how small ten thousand dollars is?
Ganbat@lemmyonline.com 10 months ago
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
When it’s inevitably going to be a lot less than that, will you eat your words?
FaceDeer@kbin.social 10 months ago
If it cost ten thousand dollars I'd throw an enormous party. That's already a very small price for a cancer treatment.
Ganbat@lemmyonline.com 10 months ago
As soon as you stop eating that pharma boot, homie.
arc@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
Kedly@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Damn you weren’t kidding about the Pharma Bros. The fuckin Tankies are glad to not be the dumbasses in thread for once
nbafantest@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“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
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 10 months ago
Cure for auto immune diseases is incoming FWIW
hackitfast@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Does anyone know yet if long COVID is an auto-immune disease? I only assume it is but otherwise don’t know.
arc@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
FartsWithAnAccent@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Fuck cancer, this sounds great!
TheDeepState@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Fuck cancer!
Jackhammer_Joe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Fuck cancer! And fuck Spez!
Plopp@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I hope cancer gets cancer!
Twofacetony@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Fuck cancer
BeautifulMind@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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 😅
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 10 months ago
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.
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 10 months ago
cue antivaxxers’ pro-plague and pro-death screeching 🤦♂️
deft@ttrpg.network 10 months ago
Any day now those vaxxed will drop dead!!
butterflyattack@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“It’s God’s will!”
arc@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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 condition or contagious disease.
june@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
TheSanSabaSongbird@lemdro.id 10 months ago
Out of curiosity, how do you think she’ll rationalize it?
trackcharlie@lemmynsfw.com 10 months ago
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.
skeezix@lemmy.world 10 months ago
It’s for rich folk. Not for us poors. Elysium.
Zoboomafoo@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
Why be that cynical about it? All technology is only for the rich when it’s first introduced.
doctorcrimson@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I never once thought about it before but how do they select a target antigen for what is effectively a human cell?
viralJ@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
ratherstayback@lemm.ee 10 months ago
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.
xor@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
what’s really cool is this plus telomerase will give us a youth serum
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 10 months ago
what’s really cool is this plus telomerase will give ~~us ~~ the extremely wealthy a youth serum
frezik@midwest.social 10 months ago
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.
01189998819991197253@infosec.pub 10 months ago
BradleyUffner@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Uhh ohh, better raise the price then.
freeindv@monyet.cc 10 months ago
I’ve heard this one before…
SlothMama@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
rabat@lemm.ee 10 months ago
During the little flu virus, whenever there would be a bunch of death due to hear attack, many newspapers would also 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.
chemicalwonka@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
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 was afraid of mRNA vaccines.
Welt@lazysoci.al 10 months ago
This will save a lot of lives in Australia and NZ. Melanoma is our bi-national cancer. Thanks, CFCs!
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 10 months ago
That’s pretty dope
WidowsFavoriteSon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
You mispelled “expensive.”
parpol@programming.dev 10 months ago
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Welt@lazysoci.al 10 months ago
You pay tax. Tax is for roads, schools, and hospitals. Why don’t you get healed when you’re sick? Because you’re a sucker, bro.
wewbull@feddit.uk 10 months ago
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.
Natanael@slrpnk.net 10 months ago
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.
oakey66@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Personalized medicine is a way to rob you blind. Drugs cost unreal money. So does the hospital administration.
beckerist@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Ghostalmedia@lemmy.world 10 months ago
But isn’t personalized treatment kind of key to treating cancer?