Newly Developed RNA-Based Vaccine Could Offer Lifelong Protection From the Flu 156
An anonymous reader writes "A new experimental flu vaccine made out of messenger RNA that may work for life is now being developed. German researchers said on Sunday that the vaccine, made of the genetic material that controls the production of proteins, protected animals against influenza and, unlike traditional vaccines, it may work for life and can potentially be manufactured quickly enough to stop a pandemic (abstract)."
Or... (Score:4, Funny)
Mutate you into some sort of strange half-man/half-flu monstrosity. 50/50. Could go either way.
Re:Or... (Score:5, Funny)
strange half-man/half-flu monstrosity
How's that work? A man that constantly seeks to deposit his genetic material into others with a side effect of replication? That's 100% man!
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How you doin'?
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Not a self-boosting vaccine (Score:3)
Or? It could replicate like DUPLICATE STORIES on Slashdot!
The Abstract and Medical Daily link don't give enough information to give me the full story, but this does not appear to be related in any way to the previous Slashdot Self-Boosting vaccine story (using viruses capable of persisting in latency as carriers).
This is a mRNA-based vaccine, of which there are currently no commercially available examples in existence. The vaccine material itself should be degraded and eliminated in very short order, with no self-replication and no persistant "self-boosting" effe
Re:Or... (Score:4, Informative)
So, what you're saying is that it is a self boosting story [slashdot.org]?
Not the same. The Ars article is a generic piece about some implications in terms of herd immunity of 'self boosting' vaccines. The current Fine Article is about a specific type of vaccine that would be long lived (if it lives up to what the researchers have found in lab animals). This flu virus would fit the definition of a 'self boosting' virus but it's not really what the first article was discussing.
Sometimes subtle things make a difference.
I'm surprised they managed to get the RNA into cells to the point where the proteins were transcribed. This technique may have many more uses than just vaccines. Interesting stuff.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Informative)
It's possible they used a different capsid structure to deliver the payload, and delivered the RNA that way.
There is a whole class of viruses that deposit RNA instead of DNA. It isn't all that new.
In typical slashdot tradition, I did not read the article; if they are using some other mechanism besides a virus capsid to deliver the RNA, that would indeed be novel.
Even more novel still, would be an epigenetic approcah that alters the way human cytoplasm interacts with influenza mRNA, preventing "expected" synthesis by having cytoplasmic cofactors influence expression. (Happens with a lot of nuclear DNA sequences already.)
Still, all of those systems are sufficiently new as scientific fields that experimenting on humans is potentially quite risky. Epigentics is absurdly new, as is proteomics.
Not to say they aren't potentially viable, just not prudent to seriously pursue in humans at this time.
Re:Or... (Score:4, Informative)
It's possible they used a different capsid structure to deliver the payload, and delivered the RNA that way.
They didn't. From what I can tell, it's naked mRNA, stabilized by associating it with Protamines [wikipedia.org] (Arginine-rich nucleoproteins found in sperm, which serve a histone-like function in packing genetic material).
In typical slashdot tradition, I did not read the article; if they are using some other mechanism besides a virus capsid to deliver the RNA, that would indeed be novel.
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DO NOT WANT.... (Score:1)
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You know that you don't have to actually be sick to take sick days?
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Same in Australia. Except that the vast majority of doctors will just go "yeah, whatever" and give you a medical certificate. On one occasion, I've gone into a clinic on a work day, and the first thing the doctor said was "how long do you need off?"
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Yeah, but that's tangential to my point. The point I was making is that, even if you're nominally required to prove your illness, the system's held in so much contempt that circumventing it's trivial.
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True, though in the Nordic countries you typically get ~6 weeks' vacation anyway, so there's less incentive to misuse sick days. It's mainly in the US where you'd want to, and there, they can't require you to see a doctor, because you might not even have health insurance.
Re:DO NOT WANT.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare this to my current office, where if you so much as sneeze the boss looks at you with narrowed eyes and asks if you'd rather telecommute that day, rather than risk infecting the entire office.
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Why couldn't they require you to see a doctor? How is having or not having health insurance relevant? If you're a salary worker, it seems perfectly valid to confirm you actually are sick. If you're hourly, you don't get paid when you're
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If the company's willing to pay for the confirmation, then I agree, it seems valid. But not otherwise.
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Policies like that are just so stupid. I remember my University had a policy like that for being excused for classes (those classes that actually cared about attendance in the first place, anyway). The one time I truly felt sick enough to need to do that I ended up trudging uphill through snow in high winds in freezing weather to health services, where I got to sit waiting for over an hour so they could look at me and perform some pointless tests and tell me that I should rest and get plenty of fluids. With
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In the United States it is wise to call in sick and come in the next day with sunburn (in summer) or raccoon face (from ski googles, in winter) just so the boss knows you aren't afraid of him and can replace the job before he can have your password disabled.
Bonus points telling the boss you aren't going to do any work the day after your sick day because you are so hung-over. Doubly true if he's a recovering alcoholic or has a religious objection to drinking.
Make sure the bastard knows his place.
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In Finland (and possibly the other Nordic countries whose welfare states served as a model for Finland's) you don't get a sick day unless you visit your neighbourhood's clinic in the morning and get a doctor to sign off on the sick day. On the plus side, you get paid for the day.
I don't know about you, but if *I* am sick, I'm in no way able to visit the nearest doctor's office (and definitely no clinic), especially not in the morning, because I'm fever-struck or similarly immobilized. Just feeling "meh" does not equal being ill.
Luckily, I'm living in Germany where employers usually demand the sign-off only from the third consecutive day on -- unless people show an obvious tendency for being sick at Fridays, Mondays, bridging days, or denied vacation days; but who abuses a system of
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I don't know what people do elsewhere, but I've never heard of a company in Denmark that had that kind of policy. I think they can legally require you to see a doctor, and most companies will probably do that in blatant cases, but that's certainly not the norm.
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You know that you don't have to actually be dead to take dead days?
zombies? (Score:5, Funny)
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area of active research (Score:3)
Afaik this class of RNA-based vaccines is interesting but still very much at the research stage. There's been a large area of research on whether they could play a role in fighting cancer [hindawi.com], as another example.
Great idea .... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Great idea .... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why it is being done in Germany. Countries with socialized health care systems are putting a lot of funding into permanent cures.
It is why when I graduate I will probably end up going to another country to work for a while. If you want to want to do permanent cures for disease then the USA is not currently the place to do it, the profit motive of medicine in the USA basically works against it happening.
Re:Great idea .... (Score:4, Informative)
This is why it is being done in Germany. Countries with socialized health care systems are putting a lot of funding into permanent cures.
It is why when I graduate I will probably end up going to another country to work for a while. If you want to want to do permanent cures for disease then the USA is not currently the place to do it, the profit motive of medicine in the USA basically works against it happening.
An example:
Albert Sabin was ready for large-scale tests, but he could not carry them out in the United States. A rival polio vaccine developed by Dr. Jonas Salk (1914–1995) in 1954 was then being tested for its ability to prevent the disease among American school children. Salk's approach was to create a vaccine using a killed form of the virus.
Some foreign virologists, especially those from the Soviet Union, were convinced of the superiority of the Sabin vaccine. It was first tested widely in Russia, Latvia, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany from 1957 to 1959. A much smaller group of persons living in Sweden, England, Singapore, and the United States received Sabin's vaccine by the end of 1959.
Read more: http://www.notablebiographies.com/Ro-Sc/Sabin-Albert.html#ixzz2DNmMbwbD [notablebiographies.com]
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Sabin used a "weakened" vaccine, and that is NOT a good thing. The military tests new drugs and vaccines on its members, and when I was in the AF I was given a "weakened" flu vaccine. I had the worst case of flu I've ever had.
We're talking about polio and children here. A weakend polio bug might be far less deadly but still have very serious lifelong consequences. I have a friend who had polio as a child, and although it didn't kill him, it did leave him with a few physical challenges which are still with h
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THAT"S your example? They guy using a vary dangerous 'cure' couldn';t get approval to use his drug on children?
That's a good thing.
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I posted this once in this thread, but since you are going to be a researcher, I'll do it again.
The profit for treatment meme is false.
Let me explain:
You have a board, a CEO, and a bunch of other upper management people.
The better the stock does, the more money they get.
Announcing a cure increases you stock value. All those people make more money, right now.
These companies are competing, sitting on a cure, mean your competitor may develop a cure, go to market and make money from there stock bump.
And if it's
Re:Great idea .... (Score:5, Interesting)
The guys that sell the current vaccines, sure. Their competitors, not so much. Permanent cures are good business because they're high-value products. You can charge a lot for them, you can get a lot of people to buy them, you can get the state to mandate them, you can get the state to pay for them, etc. The current flu vaccines aren't some endless gravy train -- they require a lot of work every year to actually get out the door and people (and governments) get pissy when you're late on delivery. A develop-once vaccine that's you can almost guarantee a sale of to each new person born is nice business, especially if it lets you screw your competitor out of yearly flu vaccine sales.
The pharma industry isn't some monolithic ideal conspiracy. They have joint goals, but they're also made up of competing entities.
If your claim was true, we wouldn't see companies continuing to sell vaccines and develop new vaccines that provide cures to diseases. But we do.
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The guys that sell the current vaccines, sure. Their competitors, not so much. Permanent cures are good business because they're high-value products. You can charge a lot for them, you can get a lot of people to buy them, you can get the state to mandate them, you can get the state to pay for them, etc. The current flu vaccines aren't some endless gravy train -- they require a lot of work every year to actually get out the door and people (and governments) get pissy when you're late on delivery. A develop-once vaccine that's you can almost guarantee a sale of to each new person born is nice business, especially if it lets you screw your competitor out of yearly flu vaccine sales.
The pharma industry isn't some monolithic ideal conspiracy. They have joint goals, but they're also made up of competing entities.
If your claim was true, we wouldn't see companies continuing to sell vaccines and develop new vaccines that provide cures to diseases. But we do.
=====
bring on the placebo
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Drug companies hate the flu vaccine. It's hard to make, expensive and the price is pretty much set by the governments. When we run short on vaccines or there is a production problem congress hauls the drug manufacturers CEOs in to chew them out in public so they can distract the public from whatever fiscal nightmare they've most recently sucked the country into.
Drug companies make money off of things like Viagra. It's cheap, easy to make, involves sex, no one dies, has a near unlimited shelf life and doesn'
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Drug companies make money off of things like Viagra. It's cheap, easy to make, involves sex, no one dies, has a near unlimited shelf life and doesn't have Jenny McCarthy making her idiotic appearances on morning shows misinforming housewives everywhere about what it does.
Viagra's a good example. Tell us again what they were researching when they discovered it...
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Well, that's true, but at least in the US you can't get it without a prescription, and you doctor is supposed to make sure you're healthy enough to take it.
Also, the drug is used by younger guys who have performance anxiety problems, so it's not just sick old men that benefit.
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They're marketing it to the wrong crowd, that shit is magic. It makes you a super-lover. The best part is, if you're much older than 40 all you have to do to get it is ask the doctor for a prescription. But they should be marketing it to the young, considering how fat young women mostly are these days (not to mention those ugly-assed tattoos and piercings, ugh).
You know the real reason why older men have erectile dysfunction? I'll tell you: same reason rich old men have wives half their age. Ever try to get
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Specific to the pharmecutical industry, if it were possible for them to prevent effective cures, why would we have new effective vaccines ever? HPV, chicken pox, those are vaccines they didn't have when I was a kid. Tylenol would have an interest in keeping kids getting chicken po
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Poe's Law strikes again. I actually can't tell if you're serious or if you're doing a parody of the "Big Pharma wants to keep us sick" conspiracy-mongering. If the former, you should be aware that profit margins on common vaccines are razor-thin. If the latter ... well played.
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http://www.in-pharmatechnologist.com/Regulatory-Safety/Novavax-shares-soar-80-as-swine-flu-spreads
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But here is why it will never happen. The world's pharmaceutical companies that make money through yearly flu vaccinations will be fighting this thing tooth and nail.
This is so stupid.
Big pharma begins with Bayer and Aspirin.
Big pharma has become bigger and stronger with every advance in medicine.
Most of the victims of the 1918 flu were healthy young adults. Most polio victims were children.
Solve problems like these and you keep tens of millions, hundreds of millions, of customers in the health care market for another half century or more. The return on investment is worth every penny.
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That's BS and its always been BS.
For starters theres no way they could get away with it without people finding out and grabbing their pitchforks and crucifying the company.
Secondly, anyone who did hold it back would only cause increased incentive for a competitor to release the magic cure and get all the money instead. And if there's one thing companies hate, its letting their competitors get all the money.
Lastly, most of these companies are part of conglomerates; and if there's one thing big business knows
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America already eradicated most of the world's diseases, or did I miss something?
An education.
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The company that announce a universal cure will get an immediate stock bump, plus drive their competitors out of business.k
So the CEO makes millions in bonuses, and long term they are far better off then their competitors.
The buy sitting on a cure, they risk their competitors releasing a cure and taking all their business.
Not looking for a cure and Sitting on a cure is a huge risks.
The it requires a mass conspiracy of 100s, if not thousands, of people.
Here is the catch: (Score:4, Insightful)
If the vaccine works in people,
That is the catch. It has not worked so far in people, or animals for that matter. But $scientist speculates it might. Till more data comes through we should soak the RNA in snake oil before freeze drying it.
Re:Here is the catch: (Score:5, Informative)
If the vaccine works in people,
That is the catch. It has not worked so far in people, or animals for that matter. But $scientist speculates it might. Till more data comes through we should soak the RNA in snake oil before freeze drying it.
I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it. I've been following this for a while now and the approach is sound. The standard ways viruses develop resistance simply won't work with this approach. It'd be a non specific antiviral so if should work on any virus. Sadly prions would likely be immune but not viruses. It's at least a decade off and maybe more but there is a lot of promise. There's reason to think viruses and bacterial infections will be treatable or preventable within the next 20 years. In the meantime we are loosing the war so we need out of the box thinking because millions will die while we are waiting for real treatments to be developed.
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In the meantime we are loosing the war so we need out of the box thinking
God no, we've loosed enough war on this planet! Don't let it out of the box!
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loosing the war
We've already lost the war on lose/loose, but now we have no word for loose. I suggest looce.
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The war isn't for more humans, it's for fewer viruses. We're not trying to cure disease so we can increase the population, we're trying to cure disease because it sucks to be sick. There's nothing that says we can't cure disease AND promote contraception.
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With the "$scientists" stuck in there, this guy clearly read "vaccine" in the title and rushed in to make his screed against Big Pharma.
That was the first thing I thought when I read the post too, but on reflection I'm going to be generous and assume he's using the Perl-type "$descriptively_named_variable" syntax which is pretty common in geek discussions.
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I didn't think it would be anything other than a variable until I saw your post. If he were being snide it would have been $cientist.
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That is the catch. It has not worked so far in people, or animals for that matter. But $scientist speculates it might.
Slashdot: news for nerds who evidently aren't interested in scientific research?
I suppose "nerd" has come to mean "I got an iphone 5!!!!" in popular usage, but I expect better of slashdot. This is a promising start and is very interesting. Even if it doesn't work in humans for the flu, it's still groundbreaking research in a very important subject area.
Till more data comes through we should soak the RNA in snake oil before freeze drying it.
NO!!! RNA is super unstable! You can't even put it in untreated water! Snake oil OR freeze drying it will render it completely useless! Hell, if you
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That is bad news! (Score:3)
Before you know it the boss will "offer" you this for free because it is "good for your health" and BANG! You only have the winter break.
That means that you HAVE to break a leg or stick a skying pole in your left eye in order to squeeze out a little more... So in the long term it is actually bad for your health! Skying is dumb, and ending up at an ER room (that looks like a Kabul market after a bomb attack) by accident is even more stupid. But when actually forced to do so by your boss... man what time do we live in?
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So you've never called in while on the bike path on a bright sunny spring morning and said "It's a bright sunny day and I'm on the bike path and I'm calling in well"?
Mental health days. Take them.
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BMO
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Much better is call in sick 'cough cough' then show-up the next day with sunburn/snowburn and a hangover.
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>Much better is call in sick 'cough cough' then show-up the next day with sunburn/snowburn and a hangover.
When you call in "healthy" you don't have to worry about this.
"I'm on the bike path. I'm not coming in. Seeya tomorrow."
What can they do? You didn't lie.
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BMO
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What can they do? Fire you for not being at work. Or charge your "vacation" account instead of your "sick" account (if you haven't yet switched to a single PTO pool).
The whole idea of calling in sick is to get a free day off while not affecting your employment status or your vacation leave balance. Many old-school industries have not yet realized the value of combined PTO (i.e.: any business which hasn't considered the liability of the sick leave currently on their books).
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Combined PTO encourages workers to come into the office even when they are sick so they can save their PTO days for vacation. Then they infect their co-workers and more productivity is lost. What is the benefit you are referring to?
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And use it or lose it sick time encourages workers to claim sickness when they just want a mental health day.
There are perverse economic incentives on both sides.
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PTO is horrid and it always, always, screws over the employee.
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It's about managing you managers expectations.
If they don't like it, they can fuck themselves. They should understand that.
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>Spoken like a true 1%-er.
Yeah, because you can discern all that from me calling in not being sick.
>Let me guess, you've never had to fill out an unexcused absence slip at your employer in your entire working life, eh?
Actually, no, I haven't, not even when I worked retail or pumping gas.
Fuck you.
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BMO - a bike snob who can't afford the bikes he's snobby about.
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> How about when you come home with a paycheck that's eight hours short?
It's called budgeting for it.
Sometimes personal time is worth a lot more than a day's pay.
>rich prick
Yeah. Whatever. You're just an asshole.
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BMO
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I'm so sick of this "1%" bullshit. If he has a boss he's probably not in the top 1% of the income scale. He may be in the top 40%. He's probably there because he worked hard to get into college and then worked hard in college and works hard at his job.
Not everyone who doesn't live under a bridge is "privileged".
And let me echo his "fuck you".
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If he's a manager in a white collar position or nearly any professional field (i.e. one that requires a college degree), he's probably in the top 20%, which is $90k, less than double the median household income in the US, and less than $15k over the median salary for a BS degree, and $10k LESS than the median with a professional degree.
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Which just underscores the real issue. The gap between the 1% and everyone else.
There will always be a top 1%, duh. But the gulf is larger then ever and widening. You can be in the top 20% and not be rich or privileged.
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Of course he can.
When you are in a town without a lot of opportunity, that alone gives him power to force you to do something. The fact that it isn't immediate and violent doesn't mean it's not there.
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Another misleading headline... (Score:5, Interesting)
I can't really see how this technique could offer lifelong protection from the flu, the current encarnation currently does not and it's not clear how it would all work.
First of all, the vaccine they developed is a "hardened" mRNA that encodes the manufacture of a particular varient one of the two proteins (hemagglutinin or HA) that are found on the surface of a flu virus (the other one is neuraminidase or NA). In this case they chose the recent H1 part of the H1N1 varient was recently going around. This mRNA tricks the host's own cells to produce this H1 protein which triggers the immune response. In contrast, the "traditional" flu shot just has HA and NA proteins (usually made from dead flu viruses grown in eggs, but sometimes made in labs) in it along with some other "stuff" like adjuvents, to amp up the immune response.
Unfortunatly this particular vaccine is like traditional vaccines in that it primes the immune system to look for HA/NA proteins, and these are the flu proteins that mutate all the time, so it would just provide life-line protection for one particular strain (and some close relatives), kinda like the current flu shot.
The current breakthrough was in "hardening" the mRNA so that it isn't dissolved in you blood. These researchers discovered a protein called protamine can bind with the mRNA so that it can make it into enough cells so that the cellular mechanims can transcribe it into the encoded protein into H1.
There is some promise that this technique could be easily adapted to target part of the flu surface proteins that don't mutate as much (whereas the current technique is mostly about refining HA/NA proteins so might not be applicable to something else) but that lifelong protection from the flu using a technique like this seems like a dream. I don't think anyone knows how to do that yet, although many folks are working on it and most of them aren't just relying on just stimulating a human immune response.
On the other hand, as with most hype, there is a kernel of something there. The current crop of modern flu-treatments (like tamiflu) target the NA part of the flu virus (technically they are neuraminidase inhibitors, so they interfere with part of the virus reproduction cycle). Unfortuantly the NA part is the faster mutating protein and there have been cases where mutation in the NA part of the virus can circumvent these modern treatments. The HA part mutates more slowly and as I mentioned above, this particular treatment has been steered to target the HA part. Who knows, maybe you'd get a vaccine with mRNA for every HA subtype they know about***. Of course that is until there is another mutation. I'm guessing that on this basis they've annointed this new thing as having the potential "lifelong" protection from the flu. As for how this would be significantly different than just giving someone a regular flu shot with all the known HA subtypes, I don't see it. Seems like a bit of hype to me compared to what other folks are working on (e.g., specific artificial antibodies that target all HA subtypes).
*** AFAIK, there are 17 types of HA, although viruses that infect humans don't appear to have that many variations, so maybe you could get away with just H1, H2, H3, H5 (the ones known to infect humans).
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It's got the potential to be a self-boosting vaccine; normally without periodic "reminders" the body t
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s/DNA/mRNA/g
FWIW, This is an mRNA technique (bonded with protamine to keep it stable). The claimed advantage of a mRNA techique over a DNA technique is that it doesn't have to get all the way into a cell nucleus (where the molecules that read the DNA exist). Since the actual protein synthesis is all you care about, it's likely more efficient to use mRNA, except that the mRNA breaks down (which is why they bond it with protamine).
I haven't seen the timescale involved in how the protamine stabilizes the mRN
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Concern? (Score:2)
So they do realize the danger of making heritable genetic changes. And then at the end they suggest giving it to children. How about just giving it to people who already reproduced? That would include old people who are some of the most at risk from the flu and possibly enou
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Does this count? (Score:2)
Missing the point - CHEAP (Score:2, Interesting)
The point of this new vaccine technology appears to primarily be one of cost. The idea is instead of vaccinating with dead / attenuated virus, or injecting viral proteins into someone to stimulate an immune response and thereby immunity, you can use RNA that will express the viral proteins in human cells (thus amplify the signal compared to injecting viral proteins directly) and get the immune system to generate antibodies against that viral protein. The RNA is designed to make only a part of the viral prot
Related to MIT discovery? (Score:2)
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It is more profitable to treat than cure, but the flu is serious fucking business. The media treats each new flu variant as a bigger deal than it needs to be. In most years, flu deaths will generally be young children and the elderly with poor immune systems, the same as any other year. But we never know when a given strain will be like the 1918 flu, infect 27% of the population and kill 3% of the population quickly. The next time it could be worse.
The Black Death killed a much higher 17% of the population,
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"It is more profitable to treat than cure"
not really, but you continue to not understand business and spout nonsense anyways.
Let me explain:
You have a board, a CEO, and a bunch of other upper management people.
The better the stock does, the more money they get.
Announcing a cure increases you stock value. All those people make more money, right now.
These companies are competing, sitting on a cure, mean your competitor may develop a cure, go to market and make money from there stock bump.
And if it's another c
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Do you know what also drives stock prices?
Revenue.
I know; crazy.
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This rhetoric was really popular in the late 60s and early 70s because one person made an estimate that mass starvation was inevitable in the next decade. There was no way the planet could support the "population bomb".
In reality, population even grew faster than expected, but malnutrition went down because we got more efficient in growing crops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [wikipedia.org]
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>I'll be frank, I've never fully understood the basic concept of a flu vaccine.
So your entire argument is based around your ignorance about the subject.
Nice.
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BMO
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I'm glad you are being frank. Do one better and do some investigation.
We are talking 10's of thousands of deaths to millions.
And it's a different immune response for each strain.
http://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/disease.htm [cdc.gov]
". Over a period of 30 years, between 1976 and 2006, estimates of flu-associated deaths in the United States range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people. "
You klive in a world with decent herd immunity, so you haven't been exposed to how nasty it can be without herd imm
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Influenza is and has always been lethal. There are different types of influenzavirus A, and they are named based on the two main proteins that allow it to infect cells: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). A new strain can result from mutation after an influenza virus is transmitted from an animal species to humans. My understanding is that (small) viral mutations occur all the time; thus, we create a flu vaccine based on the three strains that we believe are going to be most common in the next year. Th
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You should read this:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-flu-vaccine-and-narcolepsy/ [sciencebasedmedicine.org]
Re: (Score:3)
How is this not GMO Humans?
Not a fan of cannibalisim, so I couldn't care less.