Slashdot Mirror
Newly Developed RNA-Based Vaccine Could Offer Lifelong Protection From the Flu
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)."
Mutate you into some sort of strange half-man/half-flu monstrosity. 50/50. Could go either way.
.... I like sick days.
Are we seriously trying to bring about the zombie apocalypse now?
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" effect; the duration of immunity in humans appears to be merely conjecture on the part of the Medical Daily writers.
Welcome to Slashdot, Ms. McCarthy.
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, but it took over 2 years to do so.
For other diseases, the medical industry will still likely focus on selling drugs that treat symptoms because companies want to turn a profit. But there are organizations like the WHO that make the flu a big priority because they don't want to see millions die.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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, as another example.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
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. The profit loss from effectively eradicating the flu virus stands to be in the billions. Big Pharma will try and get it banned, labeled as unsafe, or do some other shifty thing to see that this idea is buried.
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
In these modern day's there are only two breaks a wage-slave has in the last bits of the year: winter break and the flu... :-D
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?
rm -rf --no-preserve-root /
It's in no small part because of flu vaccines that this is how it is. Less than a hundred years ago, influenza was Very Serious Business. In World War I it killed about as many people as the actual fighting did.
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).
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 enough middle-aged people to stop it altogether. I'm all for eradication, but still sceptical of putting even RNA into everyone in the population. OTOH they're a long way from that still.
>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.
--
BMO
If it keeps you from getting the flu but eventually kills off your cells, does that count as 'works for life?'
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 protein that is conserved, so that the antibodies will hopefully recognize a multitude of similar viruses - the reason that you have to get a flu shot every year is your body chose a site on a viral protein that is not conserved (which is most of it, thanks evolution), so last year's antibodies won't recognize this year's flu virus.
But the nice thing about the system is (1) it is cheap to make RNA, especially compared to purified proteins, and (2) the RNA can be turned into a dehydrated powder and stored without any special conditions (i.e. cold and only for X amount of time), unlike virus- or protein-based vaccines. Cheaper vaccines means you can immunize more people for less money - but also animals like pigs which are a reservoir of flu virus. Biggest problem with getting rid of viruses like flu is they get to hide out in non-human hosts, mutate, and come back to infect people whose immune systems can no longer recognize the virus. Smallpox, which as far as we know only infected humans, couldn't do this, so once enough people were immunized, the virus had no one to infect and went extinct (outside of a couple research lab freezers).
This has to be proven yet for the safety of the people. But it's a good thing there are studies like this that concerns people's health. That means we are aware and willing to discover new things for the benefit of all. I just hope this works well!
I wonder if it is related to this breakthrough by MIT last year. They developed an anti-viral drug which also targets RNA and should, theoretically, be effective against all viruses.
There is nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
How is this not GMO Humans?
Not a fan of cannibalisim, so I couldn't care less.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Influenza kills half a million people worldwide every year. Do you understand it now?
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. These are the seasonal epidemics, and are caused by antigenic drift. The "old" strains will either have died out or many people will still have immunity to them. However, if a gene reassortment occurs involving strains from different animal species (antigenic shift), then a global pandemic can result. The pandemic ends after people begin developing immunity to the new strain, and new infections begin to drop, and this phase is called the post-pandemic phase.
(In response to your other post...) incidentally, I have narcolepsy, although it wasn't caused by the vaccine. I wonder how the vaccine may have lead to these cases, though.
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
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
"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 company you loose any revenue you would have got from treatment and get no revenue from the cure.
The only win for the people running the companies is selling the cure.
Unless you think companies are run by people who would rather put off serious bonus for the next guy rather then themselves?
ProTip: look into how pharmaceutical patent regulation.
On to you're next incorrect statement:
" The media treats each new flu variant as a bigger deal than it needs to be. "
No, it does not. The H1 story? remember that? hospital around the country were full. The hospitals here in Oregon where at a point where they didn't know where they were going to put people. Completely full. Fortunately that was the point at which it peaked. Dodging a bullet buy centimeters.
You know why that's where it peaked? Media discussing the flu, reporting on the higher number of deaths in the normally high survivable age range and health.
Without that media coverage, We would have had thousands of people unable to get treatment, and 100s of more deaths. That is the best case.
Another case of people doing the right thing to head off catastrophe and the ignorant public thinking it was a waste of time because there wasn't
a catastrophe
Black death had a peak of two years, and that was in a world were people walking most places.
tl;dr
People running corporations like money now.
The media is critical in helping to limit outbreaks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do you know what also drives stock prices?
Revenue.
I know; crazy.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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
". 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 immunity.
Sadly, a generation or two of people haven't experiences the shit hitting the fan, so they don't think vaccines are a 'big deal'.
Non vaccinated people are a vector for mutation. No vaccinated people can get it and just be a carrier. SO you are infecting other people and not even know it.
Vaccines are not 100%, so herd immunity protects those people.
I used to think like your post, decades ago. When I actual got influenza* and it's hell. The I looked into it.
Anyways, I highly recommend the 'quackcast' podcast by Mark Crislip. He goes into details about a number of medical issues. At least listen to the ones regard influenza.
http://moremark.squarespace.com/quackcast-home/
he is snarky and sarcastic.
*many thing attributed to the 'flu' but the common person aren't influenza. For examples 'stomach flu' actually makes no sense.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
You should read this:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-flu-vaccine-and-narcolepsy/
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
OR it could spread unchecked bringing about the dreaded zombie Apocalypse!