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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.”
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But… But everyone having a right to medical care whether they’re rich or poor? Unthinkable! Think of the shareholders!
Ew, I can feel myself getting healthier just parsing the word “u******l a***r”. You need to censor more of that.
That sounds like SoCiAliSm!!!
I doubt that this vaccine will be covered by European health insurance providers if it costs a lot.
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?
So if this happens exactly as you describe, the net result will be a cancer treatment that is way more reliable and causes way less suffering than the existing treatments, and is slightly cheaper to boot?
That sounds awesome!
In reality they’ll likely reduce the price more than that, because the balance between the supply/demand curve will likely give them even more profit if they drop it down farther. More people will be able to afford it so it’ll create a bigger market. And then in a few years competitors will start coming out with their own mRNA cancer treatments and competition will start pushing it down even more.
No it will be more expensive. The pricing would be based on how much it currently costs, priced competitively (95% of, say, $500,000) and then they’d add $500,000 to account for the fact that you would recover more of your life and avoid suffering, so $950k total. Of course they may simply price is based on the value of your life. Say the average value of a human is $1.5M in a typical wrongful death suit; they might price it at $1.25M - a bargain!.
Before you laugh at my logic, I’ll point out that Luxturna priced their retinal degeneration drug based on how much value courts placed on lost eyesight. They found that to be around the million-dollar range. The price of treatment was then set at $850,000, because that’s clearly providing value over the monetary equivalent of loss of eyesight (Jeffrey Marrazzo, CEO, was quoted in an interview that this was the basis). Of course, there’s an evilly fun MBA discussion to be had, as well, as your pricing could also be how much it’s worth to a parent not to have to watch their children slowly and unavoidably go blind as they become teenagers. Other drugs are often based on the cost avoidance or value of human life of 100-150k per year, and I’m sure they will argue that a cure should account for the entire life amortization of such a cost. Maybe it will be $5M for someone in their 20s, but only $500k for someone in their 70s.
If this is how they price these things, then why wasn’t cancer treatment already $1.25M? Did they only just now realize how much they could squeeze out of people?
Luxturna’s treatment is for a very rare form of blindness. Unfortunately treatments for rare diseases tend to be very expensive because of how R&D and the market works, there’s much less opportunity to spread out the cost and mass production never happens. Melanoma is not a rare disease, unfortunately quite the opposite. Cancer in general even less so.
In many cases,in the US, the rack rate for a full course of a serious cancer is easily the $500k I suggested and frequently more than double that. My treatment for a suspected single point melanoma was close to $75,000 and it was a single outpatient procedure with a pre- and post-op office follow up. No chemo, no stage designation, nothing - zero cancer found at the site of the questionable biopsy site.
It’s true the Luxturna is an odd case (though the OP article is talking about customized treatment so it is appropriate here). It’s not the disease or cure but the justification of how they determined the cost of their treatment. Not based on the research cost or market, not based on the production or application of the treatment, but on the value of your eyesight they would be preserving.
Depends on how much time was spent on R&D. You have to recover those costs. I know everyone wants everything for free but it takes a fuck ton of man hours and tons of investments to get to this point. You can’t just give it away unfortunately.
Did they pay for their own R&D? Usually that get socialized and then the profits are privatized, it’s the American Way.
I like to shit on big pharma as much as the next guy, but in this case, yes they do. Developing new drugs is a ludicrously risky and expensive venture, typically costing billions of dollars. Sometimes it may be subsidized somewhat, sure, but the vast majority of it is coming out of pocket for these companies.
Sometimes it may be subsidized somewhat, sure, but the vast majority of it is coming out of pocket for these companies.
You seem awfully sure about that. What are you basing it on? MRNA research alone was massively funded with taxpayer money. Coding for new proteins is almost trivial compared to what went into developing the technology.
You actually can. The simplest way is to literally just give the research away and charge a fair price for the medicine. That’s allowed.
The slightly more capitalist way would be to sell the rights to the government to recoup costs.
The slightly less capitalist way is for the government to notify you that you don’t own it anymore because of the public good.
This is also ignoring exactly how much the public already funds the basic research that goes into pharmaceuticals, which is quite a bit more than you might expect, so the argument of what’s even “fair” is less clearly in favor of the company than you might expect.
There’s a tricky balance.
For every endeavor that could recoup its costs in a fairly reasonable way, there are several other attempts that end in failure.
If you know that best case your project can be modestly better than break even, but it will most likely completely fail, would you invest in it?
I could respect an argument for outright socializing pharmaceutical efforts and rolling the needs into taxes and cutting out the capitalist angle entirely, but so long as you rely on capitalist funding model in any significant amount, then you have to allow for some incentive. When the research is pretty much fully funded by public funds, that funding should come with strings attached, but here it seems the lead up was largely in capitalist territory.
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I use to agree with you but that metric sailed a long to me ago. All pricing, everywhere now, is based on how much they think people will pay, not cost plus a reasonable profit.
A $1300 iPhone probably cost around $200 to actually produce, and that covers development.
Any cost savings on production, or cheaper materials, is profit passed on to the stockholder. It does not go to workers and certainly does not go to a cheaper sales price.
Would somebody think of the poor pharmaceutical executives?
Yeah; it’s not like it’s insulin.
True, but individuals dont have to pay for that. This is 100% something that can be taxpayer funded as it pretty much benefits everyone.
Otherwise, it just becomes a penalty for poor people and another luxury for the rich.
Nearly all of the basic research is already taxpayer funded through research grants. There are still development costs (especially trials and such), but most of the money spent my large pharmaceutical companies goes into marketing. (it’s been a few years, but last time I looked in the mid-teens it was more than 50% of their overall budget iirc)
U clearly dont understand how public healthcare works.
You’re not going to get a sympathetic ear around here. Lemmy wants everything for free. Bunch of children watching capitalism literally burn the world down, but has no clue that nice things cost effort, and effort = $.
Now if you want to talk about making drug advertisements illegal, I’m all in. Wouldn’t that make a wonderful impact? Make big pharma put the money into R&D that they put into ads.
That’s what my taxes are for. I rarely pay more than $5 for medication, if anything. I also pay significantly less in taxes than US citizens and have less potholes in the roads.
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.
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
Yeah like we have cancerous cells in our bodies all the time, it’s when our immune system isn’t dealing with them that it becomes a growth or tumor.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
god wants the children to have incurable tumors
I mean don’t people already spout this crap?
Mhmm, sins of the parents pass down and all that. That’s sky daddy justice right thurr.
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.
So much for “Whatever you did for the least among you, you did also for me”. Remember they now say that the Sermon on the Mount is too liberal. They don’t agree with Jesus’s message because they have people they don’t like. They have enemies they want to hurt.
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
You should inject bleach using a flash light.
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
In my day Laetrile was the quack conservative medicine for cancer.
it’s naaatural
Guys, just look at the economy! Infinite, uninhibited growth is a GOOD THING!!!
It’s just a cold.
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.
Idk man that sounds pretty communist to me
A country, looking after its people?! Get that communism outta here!
I don’t believe in welfare!
I know, right? It’s almost like communism is a good idea or something.
You and the person above you are confusing communism with socialism
¿Por qué no los dos? I’m not confused.
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.
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?
Are you struggling with reading comprehension or just being purposely obtuse?
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. :))
Lol everywhere. Ever been outside your country?
United States are in the same group as China, Yemen and Syria on this one.
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
They’ll have to fight the shareholders of the health insurance industry, who don’t want to pay for a long-term condition
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.
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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.
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.
Are you saying there is proof that suicidal people have a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m aware of instances of correlation between chemicals found in spinal taps and depression, but correlation does not equal causation and drug companies and doctors love to pretend it does in this case. I believe the the chemical imbalance is caused by the depression, no the other way around. I can’t prove that, but they can’t prove their claim either as far as i can tell.
Are you saying there is proof that suicidal people have a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m aware of instances of correlation between chemicals found in spinal taps and depression, but correlation does not equal causation and drug companies and doctors love to pretend it does in this case. I believe the the chemical imbalance is caused by the depression, no the other way around. I can’t prove that, but they can’t prove their claim either as far as i can tell.
Are you saying there is proof that suicidal people have a chemical imbalance in the brain? I’m aware of instances of correlation between chemicals found in spinal taps and depression, but correlation does not equal causation and drug companies and doctors love to pretend it does in this case. I believe the the chemical imbalance is caused by the depression, no the other way around. I can’t prove that, but they can’t prove their claim either as far as i can tell.
I didn’t say that at all, and I was agreeing with you. “Chemical imbalance” is of course a misnomer. What I said was that in the case of acute crisis, drugs can help.
“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
Cure for auto immune diseases is incoming FWIW
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.
It’s coming! I’m confident in my lifetime they’ll have it solved. They’re actually working on an “anti-vaccine” that corrects celiac/diabetes. I’m also interested because I have 1 celiac and 1 diabetes. Celiac sucks.
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Atkins is dead.
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.
It seems like a mix. Part from organ damage, part from misbehaving immune response in some people
COVID is a virus, so not an autoimmune illness. Long COVID might be partly autoimmune
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!
Fuck cancer!
Fuck cancer! And fuck Spez!
Speaking of cancer…
I hope cancer gets cancer!
Fuck cancer
You know what this sounds like to me?
Like Moderna is gonna ask $10k a poke.
Edit: ITT: Pharma bros telling me how awesome artificially-inflated medication prices are.
Sure would be nice if capitalism didn’t exist 🤪
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Sent from my iPhone
Across a publicly funded network with technology originally paid for by the public.
Brought to you by Carl’s Jr.
Fuck you! I’m eating
Publicly funded? Sounds like commie shit to me.
/jk right? Right???
Capitalism is the only system that can make things dont you kno?
It wouldn’t exist at all if capitalism didn’t exist.
People would just get cancer and die like they used to.
Capitalism is the reason we (and you) have nice things.
Capitalism is why we have ruined the environment.
Other economic systems aren’t exactly protective of the environment either though, so I don’t really get your point.
Other economic systems don’t incentivise companies to produce trash products that break quickly to keep the customer coming back, or to use non-recyclable materials because they cost 3 cents less.
Which economic system, in your opinion, would produce the highest quality products? And you can use whatever definition of quality you like
The Six Nations managed to keep their economic system functioning without a hiccup for at least 15,000 to 25,000 years. That one seems to work.
Oh yes, they do. Corruption, unrealistic n-year plans and secrecy for example lead to defective products, poor quality and accidents. That’s exactly what happened in Chernobyl, and I don’t need to tell you how bad that was for the environment.
What happened at Chernobyl was the politicians refusing to listen to the scientists. They were performing an experiment that the designers of the plant told them was exceedingly dangerous, and blew up their reactor. At least they did it unintentionally, unlike the Army Corps of Engineers.
Capitalism is the only one really employed across the world.
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Yes, no innovation has been done under any system but capitalism. /s Let’s forget about how totalitarian Russia was the first to space. Let’s forget about how much medicine was developed under the religious authoritarianism of ancient Arabia. Let’s forget about how much philosophy was conceived under feudalism.
Let’s totally forget that The Six Nations managed to maintain a cooperative collective of hundreds of thousands of people for at least 15,000-25,000 years with their environmental impact being quite literally the creation and tending of “The Garden of Eden.”
What six nations?
Iroquois, Mohawk, Seneca, Ojibwe, and I forget the last two
What are they though? Are they indigenous groups in Australia or America?
arabic numbers bad.
or is it because edison couldnt claim this to be an american invention aswell? just because america is full of thieves doesnt mean they invented shit.
rockets…werner von braun
lightbulb…lumiere
computer …conrad zuse
internet…tim
i am sure americans have invented absolutely nothing and stolen absolutely everything.
biontech is german, pfizer are the murican scumbags.
tiktok&wechat… chinese
are you still on meta or drugs?
Capitalism is the reason third generation morons have multiple private jets.
Capitalism =/= money.
I’m sure leaving reddit was a good idea, but joining lemmy might not have been. People here are just delusional in their approach to reality.
It seems a lot of people came here because they’re too reddit for reddit.
Did you really think these new vaccine will be affordable? Those nice things are for the rich.
Recently read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and in those books an anti aging “vaccine” is made and shared freely for the citizens of Mars, but on Earth where the rich and powerful still control everything, its used as an incentive to come and work for the most powerful companies, or if you have the money then you can buy it.
I literally hope such a thing is never invented, imagine if the Musk’s, Trump’s, Bezos’, and Putin’s of the world lived for hundreds of years instead of finally fucking dying at 90-100 at most.
Terrifying.
That might actually be enough inequality that we might do something about it.
Look up Ted Faro’s story from Horizon Zero Dawn.
It wouldn’t exist at all if capitalism didn’t exist.
Science doesn’t need capitalism to exist. Technology doesn’t need to be for-profit to be developed.
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.
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.
I know it sounds awful, but I’ve had family members die of cancer in the US and Europe, and 10k for a cure wouid have been a bargain in either case.
And hopefully with time the price will come down.
If this truly works, it’ll be one of those things that cheaper for society to pay for than letting the disease drag on and fighting it with our old methods.
The $10k isn’t really the point. That’s just a number thrown out as an example of what we expect a company to do. The real issue is power. Worst case it’ll be either you go into essentially permanant debt by attempting the treatment, try traditional treatments with wildly varying success rates, or probably just die. Money isn’t even a question really, it’s using cancer and the treatment of it as a way to profit at levels far beyond reasonable.
A business should make money. Has to stay open somehow. Make surviving achievable for a good life and still make millions. We were almost universally in shock when that Bowser fellow has his wages garnished by 30% for the rest of his life. Apart from the legal aspect as a reason, how would this be any different?
This is the world we live in. It shouldn’t be though. I lost my Mom to cancer and she’s one of those people who would have attempted traditional methods due to the overwhelming cost this one promises. I doubt she’s the only one.
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Damn you weren’t kidding about the Pharma Bros. The fuckin Tankies are glad to not be the dumbasses in thread for once
When it’s inevitably going to be a lot less than that, will you eat your words?
If it cost ten thousand dollars I’d throw an enormous party. That’s already a very small price for a cancer treatment.
Right? Bunch of morons who never had cancer, or never knew anyone who was diagnosed and treated for cancer, thinking a 10k treatment is expensive.
Communism Stan’s be Stanning
10k is expensive
Less expensive than now? Yes
Still expensive
That’s zero sum thinking.
If it was 10k that is, literally, an order of magnitude cheaper.
You can’t have it both ways. The people who I know who have had cancer, and had it treated, the cost has been well over 100k. Some over 200k. That’s per time. If it came back it would cost that all over again.
So which is it. Is it evil that a new treatment could cost 90% less? Or should the capitalists do what they do and charge 300k for this better treatment?
As soon as you stop eating that pharma boot, homie.
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.
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?
america is just sad
Do drugs other than betel nuts grow on trees in your country?
Dying from cancer is also sad. Chemo is also sad. Who wins? Find out tonight at 8pm
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 😅
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.
There is a common misconception that long term effects will manifest long after the injection. All vaccines with longterm effects manifested their effect shortly after the injection. It makes little sense that you will have adverse reactions months or years later because the compounds are long gone from your system.
There was also the misconception that the vaccine was rushed and that steps were skipped or shortened during testing. That is not the case. The administrative processes were prioritized and there was a huge amount of test candidates so testing could be done much quicker. The normal process is not longer because they want to gather more long term data but because it just takes longer to gather it.
There is a common misconception that long term effects will manifest long after the injection. All vaccines with longterm effects manifested their effect shortly after the injection. It makes little sense that you will have adverse reactions months or years later because the compounds are long gone from your system.
There are lots of things that do damage that isn’t necessarily obvious in the short term, especially if you don’t know exactly what that damage might look like. There’s a reason I said we probably made a good bet with mRNA vaccines for COVID, the odds that they’ve done some kind of damage that isn’t immediately apparent and we’ll see an uptick in some problem or another a few years down the line in vaccinated people is very low but not zero. If the risk of this vaccine damaging patients in some fashion that wasn’t apparent within the duration of trials was zero, rather than merely low there would be no reason to make the manufacturers immune to liability from damages caused as a consequence.
On the upside, we conveniently have a large population who have decided to be the control group for mRNA COVID vaccines out of political spite so we have a large sample to compare long term outcomes between.
We really don’t know the long term consequences of mRNA vaccines.
We know they are way safer than the old DNA vaccines because they don’t literally give you a small dose of the virus like the old vaccines.
cue antivaxxers’ pro-plague and pro-death screeching 🤦♂️
Any day now those vaxxed will drop dead!!
I often go by a place were somebody tagged the wall with something that roughly translates to “Half the vaccinated will die”.
So half will not? Ever?
The other half becomes vampires, obviously.
So, the 5G mind controller chips in it do make sense after all.
It’s an easy issue to resolve, really. Just install garlic frequency beams to our 5g towers and boom solved the vampire crisis
Everyone dies
Exactly.
Whomever did that tag didn’t think enough to notice they’re implying that the vaccine gives ethernal life to half those who take it.
(It also neatly illustrates how simplifying one’s idea down to a slogan actually increases the chance of ending up implying something else than the idea one wanted to pass)
Does that mean I won’t have to go to work anymore or will they find a way to indenture and monetize my corpse?
Capital zombies. I don’t think I’ve seen that movie done…
Haha, but if we do, they will follow in a gross and painful fashion: In Canada, 83% of the population received at least one dose. I believe we are
39M40M now (lol, I was sleeping).So 6,800,000 gonna keep the electricity going; grow and process food; and perform medical procedures? --Oh wait, all the medical people are dead. Speaking of dead, there aren’t any firemen to dispose of the 33,200,000 bodies! Damn, biohazard everywhere. I’m assuming their edjumacashun didn’t be gud, so I’m not hopeful of their prospects for rebuilding, but I suspect rage will take out who is left before it gets to that point anyways.
Edit: Math is hard
Surelly at least the food problem and the bodies problem can be solved at the same time by resorting to cannibalism?!
With a bit of luck the vaxxed would drop dead in early Winter, which would help preserve the meat longer.
What’s the proportion of the overweight in Canada? I’m thinking maybe the energy problem too can be solved with a proper use of all that fat.
Well if we wait long enough, they will! See! We were right all along!
“It’s God’s will!”
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, how do you think she’ll rationalize it?
I don’t think she will other than that it might save her life. She’ll live with the dissonance, which as an evangelical Christian is nothing new for her.
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.
Why be that cynical about it? All technology is only for the rich when it’s first introduced.
I don’t believe I’m being cynical, I think I’m being realistic.
Recall that the formula for insulin was given for free to the university of toronto and now most people in the USA cannot afford insulin even though the cost of creation has not changed since the 1950’s.
It was only extremely recently that 35 dollar insulin became available in the USA and that’s still obscenely overpriced.
Reference: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country
I’m curious what cost figure they’re using here because the cost seems odd for Canada. I used to work at a pharmacy and insulin is fully covered by public drug plans (there absolutely needs to be a federally public drug plan), I’m thinking of plans like Trillium in Ontario where you pay a deductible based on yearly income. Employer private insurance to my knowledge would cover it to $0, but possibly not the dispensing fee, which is VERY close to the amount listed here. If they are talking just raw cost per vial with no coverage then that’s possibly accurate, it’s just very rare to actually see that at the register at a pharmacy.
In general I like comparing the US and Canada healthcare regimes because we are pretty much linked to their economy, however seeing where our healthcare over/under performs vs the US you can really link to the differences in the way healthcare is implemented. Broadly speaking we have comparable outcomes, with US and Canada having areas of specialty, however the cost spent by the US on healthcare per capita is insanely higher. People will pad this by claiming that money is because of healthcare research in the US which “the world benefits from at our cost” but the figures aren’t often added together in that way. It really is the delivery of healthcare in the US where there are insane costs compared to every other G20 country with detailed healthcare data.
The insane addition in the USA is due to so many middle men working to up the cost basis to increase their bottom line, essentially the insurance companies are running a racket.
Here is the associated research report that the link I provided used for their data aggregation and comparisons:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA700/RRA788-1/RAND_RRA788-1.pdf
These are the associated surveys:
https://www.t1international.com/access-survey16/
https://www.t1international.com/access-survey18/
https://www.t1international.com/access-survey/
Specifically for your question about cost basis it seems they tallied the total price for the insulin based on its chemical costs (for each type of insulin) and then cross referenced that with the price placed down on both prescription drugs and over the counter drugs listed in the IQVIA MIDAS database:
“In our analysis, we used prescription-drug market data from IQVIA’s MIDAS database.2 The data we examined cover the year 2018 and span 33 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including the United States.3 We did not restrict our analysis to prescription drugs, as certain insulins are available over the counter in some countries (including the United States).” - RAND RRA788 PDF Page 2, Paragraph 2; Mulcahy, Schawm & Edenfield “Comparing insulin prices in the United States to Other Countries” 2020.
(IQVIA MIDAS: https://www.iqvia.com/solutions/commercialization/brand-strategy-and-management/market-measurement/midas)
Once they had a general understanding and baseline for what the products should cost they then indexed and compared prices globally using volume weighted pricing, they do note specifically that the manufacturer prices they used from MIDAS does not reflect rebates or discounts that would exist at point of sale (RAND RRA788 Pg 3 Para 2).
These are the references the research paper provided:
Cefalu, William T., Daniel E. Dawes, Gina Gavlak, Dana Goldman, William H. Herman, Karen Van Nuys, Alvin C. Powers, Simeon I. Taylor, and Alan L. Yatvin, on behalf of the Insulin Access and Affordability Working Group, “Insulin Access and Affordability Working Group: Conclusions and Recommendations,” Diabetes Care, Vol. 41, No. 8, August 2018, pp. 1299–1311.
Fuglesten Biniek, Jean, and William Johnson, “Spending on Individuals with Type 1 Diabetes and the Role of Rapidly Increasing Insulin Prices,” Health Care Cost Institute, January 21, 2019. As of September 1, 2020: https://healthcostinstitute.org/diabetes-and-insulin/spending-on-individuals-with-type-1- diabetes-and-the-role-of-rapidly-increasing-insulin-prices
IQVIA, “MIDAS,” webpage, undated. As of September 1, 2020: https://www.iqvia.com/solutions/commercialization/brand-strategy-and-management/market- measurement/midas
IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, Medicine Use and Spending in the U.S.: A Review of 2018 and Outlook to 2023, Durham, N.C., May 9, 2019.
Roehrig, Charles, The Impact of Prescription Drug Rebates on Health Plans and Consumers, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Altarum Institute, April 2018.
Tribble, Sarah Jane, “You Can Buy Insulin Without a Prescription, but Should You?” Kaiser Health News, December 14, 2015. As of August 20, 2020: https://khn.org/news/you-can-buy-insulin-without-a-prescription-but-should-you/
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…”.
It’s not necessarily impossible to target prions but it doesn’t seem trivial. The reason they’re dangerous is specifically the incorrect shape because that shape changes interaction behavior with other biological molecules, and immune cells could theoretically test for that change in interaction. But that’s more complicated than regular molecule recognition which immune cells normally do. There’s probably research in trying to make immune cells handle that too, but I haven’t seen any articles about it.
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.
If it’s based off mutated dna do they have to tailor a vaccine to each case? Or do cells mutate the same way every time?
They have to manufacture it unique to the individual. Luckily, manufacturing custom mRNA is not very expensive.
That’s really cool that they can do that. Kind of reminds me of something out of Star Trek when they have to “synthesize a cure” or whatever for some space disease.
Especially compared to normal cancer treatment
In general, mutations can happen anywhere on any gene, so every patient’s cancer will have its unique signature of mutations. However, like in the evolution of organisms by natural selection, most random mutations will have a detrimental effect and the cells carrying it will die. Some of the mutations will be neutral and despite the change in the amino acid, the cells harbouring it won’t survive better or worse than cells that don’t have it. But a few mutations will make the cancer cells proliferate faster or evade the immune system better, which will lead to these cells surviving and ultimately overtaking the population of the cancer cells. The latter mutations often happen in the same places on the same genes, and in melanoma for example, in as many as 41% of cases the 600th amino acid in a protein called BRAF mutates from valine to alanine (so the code for that mutation is “BRAF V600E”), and BRAF is only one example of such genes that commonly mutate in the same position.
So to answer your question - I don’t know Moderna’s exact protocol, but my guess is that the tailored vaccine will contain a mixture of these commonly occurring mutations and some mutations that are unique to the patient.
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.
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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
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Full of cold I sniggered way too hard at that and 3 years of shnots came out. Cheers for the laugh and clear out. Happy new year
Godammit lemmy. Can’t we even enjoy a fucking cancer cure for a few minutes before the communist ranting begins?
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Apparently not
Fuck Cancer!
Nope. I’m constantly on the edge of quitting lemmy because of this shit.
It is kind of an annoyance. I don’t even think communists are all the way wrong tbh. I think there must be a middle path between what we’ve seen historically in communist countries and the slavish capitalism of the United States.
Thing is that isn’t the sole and single thought in my mind.
Like, I can see a scientific breakthrough for instance and be amazed and grateful.
Just in to say, not middle ground, different path. It’s not a 2d spectrum, despite what they teach us
The way I see it, authoritarianism and centralization are the big bad - capitalism works great with intense competition (it just incentivizes the opposite), and communism doesn’t require central planning
You have to minimize and have constant churn in every locus of power, or power hungry people will be drawn in and entrench themselves
Every medical treatment is expensive at first.
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.
telomeres are cells’ biological clock… they get shorter with each division, and is the general cause of your body breaking down, round the 80’s.
telomerase and other chemicals can reset those telomeres, but also cause the body’s existing precancerous cells to go malignant. (telomeres also limit cancer cell growth, and creating telomerase is one of the mutations required for full on cancer)
so, if we can regrow cells telomeres without causing cancer… we have a youth serum.
but there’s already other telomerase gene therapy in development anyways…and is the general cause of your body breaking down
This is the step where a heavy [citation needed] comes along. There are a lot of complex processes involved in aging, we have no idea if simply “make the telomeres longer!” is going to solve all of that. Frankly it seems unlikely that that’s all there is to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an optimist when it comes to longevity research. I think aging is a problem that will eventually be solved. But there’s not going to be just one “cure for aging”, there’s a lot of things that go wrong over time and we’re probably going to have to find ways to fix each of them as they come along.
Right. You would have to look at alzheimers, osteoporosis, arthritis, liver failure, heart failure, gut microbe health, and a million other things that can go wrong in old age. It’s a tall claim to say “all this can be solved by telemerase”. In fact, having one thing claiming to solve a million different issues is a big red flag for quack medicine.
A good rule of thumb in medicine is “anything that does everything probably does nothing”.
One of the “blue zones” (places with long lives) famously had:
- No birth certificates
- A post war government pension to anyone over 60
So lots of 40 year olds in 1940 suddenly claimed to be and were recorded as 60. Then in 2000 100 (80), then in 2020 120 (100)
So what appeared to be exceptional lifespans were really just fraud
Though our telomere limit appears to be 120 or so, so maybe some are trying the truth
How so? Cancer is something that one would be statistically likely to get eventually if you didn’t first die of anything else I suppose, so it’d certainly be useful in extending effective lifespan if you already had a youth serum, but how would a treatment for cancer do anything for other age related disease?
You get cancer all the time your body has natural mechanisms of finding and breaking down the cancerous cells. As we age some of these mechanisms start to falter, cells divide, but small errors over time accumulate.
A youth serum is really not the goal, the goal is fixing errors in these systems, maintaining current functions and creating a new mechanism.
This would work like a booster for this mechanisms and effectively make it possible to maintain and improve these systems. The side effect being an increase lifespan to some degree.
I suppose this I just the cancer component, but several other things are still needed on the field of longevity research for a “youth serum” to be viable.
I hope so much that this isn’t a predecessor to this.
An immediate red flag:
“Now if you replace that man with a cop … 🤷 … the picture changes”
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No, but it gives you autism though /s
Uhh ohh, better raise the price then.
The article doesn’t go into much in the way of details, so I can’t begin to say how it might extend into the treatment of other cancers, but it does make it clear that this treatment is specifically for melanoma only. Which is great–it’s a deadly cancer. But without more information, we shouldn’t get too excited about this being able to treat other types of cancer.
I would be extremely surprised if this approach only worked for melanoma. I expect this is just the first cancer type they’ve tried applying it to. Some excitement is warranted here, IMO.
