Actually, I ask so as to be corrected:
The world’s first personalised mRNA cancer vaccine for melanoma halves the risk of patients dying or the disease returning, according to trial results that doctors described as “extremely impressive”.
Melanoma affects more than 150,000 people a year globally, according to 2020 figures from World Cancer Research Fund International.
Patients who received the vaccine after having a stage 3 or 4 melanoma removed had a 49% lower risk of dying or the disease recurring after three years, data presented at the world’s largest cancer conference showed. The NHS in the UK is among the organisations testing the jab.
I’ve a very vague idea running around my head. Rough mind – a rough idea not a rough mind, we all already know that.
So, it’s long been an idea that it would be really great if we could “vaccinate” the immune system to go eat cancers. This would require a cheap – in fact by the standards of the industry, very, very, cheap – method of producing vaccines. There are so many cancers, the “vaccine” would need to be personalised for each patient. We’d like to get that “vaccine” production price – not per shot, but per personalisation – down into the $100s or perhaps $1,000s per treatment.
Hmm, OK. Now, I’ve got this vaguery that that’s what mRNA was all about. Covid was a sidestep, it just happened to arrive as the tech was maturing. But the aim was always cancers.
So, am I right on this? Or is this something I’ve made up after the fact?
BlokeinGermanywhoisnowinmycountry?
That’s my memory as well.
There was a similar story recently about personalised vaccines against returning prostate cancer.
A side question – I know they want to get these good news stories out for further funding etc but isn’t the standard measure for surviving cancer 5 years as that’s deemed a long enough time to measure effects without other diseases and illnesses causing death?
it would be really great if we could “vaccinate” the immune system to go and eat cancers
It’s a sign of a seriously over-medicalised world that this could ever be thought desirable let alone do-able.
The sole purpose of the pharmaceutical industry is to make money for their shareholders.
They have zero interest in ‘curing’ people, but lots of interest in creating a population of people who need their products to deal with chronic illnesses. Caused by their ‘cures’.
I mean, if you aren’t sick, you don’t need them do you?
Wow, it would be great if it worked on the other 86% of the population! Or have the ABBC and the NHS just displayed their favoured ethnicity?
my last comment is awaiting moderation…
it would be really great if we could “vaccinate” the immune system to go and eat cancers
Only in a seriously over-medicalised world of atheists could this thought to be practical or desirable.
@Addolff
Let me fix that for you:
“The whole point of the bakery industry is to make money for their shareholders.
They have zero interest in ‘feeding’ people, but lots of interest in creating a population of people who need their products to have lunch.”
My rough memory is that the number of treatments needed for each individual in order to tackle cancer kept resulting in side effects worse than the cancer itself. So, the idea was to use mRNA as a preventative vaccine for Covid instead, as only one injection would be required, thus minimising the side effects.
The fact that huge numbers of people nevertheless demanded as many injections as possible must have been a pleasant surprise to the shareholders.
But again, that’s just MY rough memory.
At the last I saw its mostly ‘category’ rather than true personalisation , and so very good results if you have both the relevant DNA and the melanoma had the relevant mutation for the treatment. Side effects could be grim (trials restricted to terminal patients in the one I was closest to) but up side was near miracle cure level if you were in the very small group that hit both requirements and avoided the worse side effects (which presumably could also be limited with greater screening across the phenotype).
True personalisation is I suspect a long way off especially as it’s crafted on both the subject’s and the tumor’s DNA and it may not be possible in many cases to get enough differentiation that is also targetable.
Be wary about stoking impossible demands and expectations here i think. Very niche but very important treatments at the moment and for the foreseeable but as knowledge grows and success rack up develpoment will hopefully widen applicability .
Vaccines for epidemics are much easier in that sense as you have a common DNA target.
I’ve just seen a headline suggesting that Ozempic has some potentially fatal side effects.
How long was it tested for before it was released to the guinea pigs, sorry, public?
Our immune systems are fighting off cancer every day. Hence, isn’t the trick (for the majority) to preserve/boost that immune system, keeping it healthy and active.
Professor Angus Dalgleish has been looking at a possible generic vaccine or treatment. Shove some particular bacteria into the arm (don’t quote me on the detail, look it up for yourself, he’s explained it on Campbell’s channel) and that gives the immune system a huge boost, against all sorts of problems, not simply cancer. But there is no money in it for Pharma, so don’t hold your breath.
“Vaccine”
Or treatment. Vaccines into billions of arms need to be proven to be ultra safe, treatments for someone who is already terminally ill less so.
““The whole point of the bakery industry is to make money for their shareholders.
They have zero interest in ‘feeding’ people, but lots of interest in creating a population of people who need their products to have lunch.””
Its not really the same though is it? A person who eats a loaf of bread will naturally need another one tomorrow, or the day after, by the perfectly healthy mechanism of living and burning up the calories. So there is no incentive for the baker to make bread that harms the consumer in anyway, because if he does he kills his market. He gets his repeat custom naturally, without having to manufacture it by designing the product in a way that requires it.
Whereas a drug company does not want a pill that cures the patient on day 1 and never needs another pill, that makes no money at all. What the drug company wants is a pill (under its patent control naturally, so nothing thats freely and cheaply available) that the patient must take forever, and may also have all manner of side effects that require other drugs as well. That means a nice fat profit stream.
Guess what sort of medications we get?
Guess what medications are the frontline these days? Genetic therapies – treat once, for life.
Indeed, in the case of MRNA covid vaccines one treatment was all you needed for the rest of your life.
As is well known, bakeries have paid billions of dollars in fines.
But wouldn’t the baker want to put chemicals in his bread that made you crave more?
Srsly though, I agree that BigPharma isn’t totally trustworthy, but it isn’t quite as nefarious as products designed to milk the population and/or hook them or harm them.
@jim & tmb
Yes, bakeries are sometimes different from pharmaceuticals.
My point was more that whenever someone says “X only want to make money / X only care about shareholders and this is bad” I assume they’re rejecting Smith’s point about the benevolence of the baker.
And if they are, I feel free to ignore the rest of what they’re saying.
Jm,
“So there is no incentive for the baker to make bread that harms the consumer in anyway, because if he does he kills his market”.
I take it you’ve never had a Greggs sausage roll then.
“But wouldn’t the baker want to put chemicals in his bread that made you crave more?”
Yes he might, if he was a psychopath hell bent on making as much money as possible (hello pharmaceutical industry!), which is why we have rules on food safety, so bakers can’t lace their bread with crack cocaine to boost sales…….
But weirdly enough the bread safety laws aren’t administered by a revolving carousel of people hopping between Big Bread and the Food Standards Agency. Funny that, isn’t it?
“As is well known, bakeries have paid billions of dollars in fines.”
And killed thousands with their bread that had terrible side effects……….
Everyone bitches about big pharma not making investments in drugs that return minimal profits. Do we not have charity sector, the state and state funded universities who wish to help out on that? After all isn’t it the bods in those sectors who are usually bitching about big pharma? Let them lead by example.
Chris and others
Technical question.
How would a tumour have a different DNA to the patient ? Is it seen by the body as a parasite ?
Fascinating stuff. I couldn’t see how modifying a payient’s RNA/DNA would protect againnst a virus, but against cancer it seems to make more sense.
You are right. The proof of the pudding, as always, is in the Phase 3 double blind (if possible), randomized, placebo controlled (usually) trial.
How you would do this with N=1 personalised mRNA cancer vaccines is, well, debatable. There is push to all kinds of stupidity like historical controls, some idiots even promoting the idea that no clinical trials at all would be needed in some instances. But by definition if you are administering a unique product you can’t have a control group. Or your control group is just “standard of care” and you try to assess your individualised medicine on a sample basis anyway. Making it as much a test of the accuracy of the personalization as the effect of the product.
The idea is quite sound, the vaccine was greatly effective for about 6 weeks, so rather disappointing, and not good to coerce billions to take it. And we know a great deal more about the safety of the mRNA platform, which is not good for prevention of low impact inevitable infectious diseases, less a problem for cancer. And if anyone cares to admit, it is the only serious type of pharmaceutical product where we cannot dose the active ingredient to reasonable accuracy, because the active ingredient is produced in unknown quantities in unknown cells, for an unknown time, with all unknowns varying from one person to the next.
Sadly no longer in Portugal.
Genetic therapies – treat once, for life.
Would have thought most of the vaccines were the same.
And for most people for most drugs, surely the same applies. The get something once, they get a course of treatment, it goes away, they never get it again. It’s the minority who end up on continuing drug regimes.
“ … It’s the minority who end up on continuing drug regimes…”
Have you noticed how hard they’re pushing statins?
The intention there is that everyone ends up “needing” them for the rest of their lives.
Other examples will follow, no doubt.
The bread/drugs regulation thing comes back to my oft-repeated thing of proportionality to frequency of transactions, size of information, size of risk, size of damage.
Buying bread “needs” low regulation because it’s a frequent transaction, from the frequent transactions you build up a large quantity of information, if it goes wrong today, you chuck it away and buy from somebody else tomorrow; if it goes wrong today it is highly likely it will go wrong in a minor way; if it goes wrong it is highly unlikely to go wrong; if it goes wrong it’s only a quid or so you’ve lost.
Buying a mortgage “needs” higher regulation because it’s a rare transation, you have very low information, if it goes wrong you can’t chuck it away and try another one tomorrow, if it goes wrong it will be highly damaging.
I couldn’t see how modifying a patient’s RNA/DNA would protect against a virus, but against cancer it seems to make more sense.
mRNA vaccines don’t modify a patient’s RNA or DNA, they temporarily programme dendritic cells to produce particular antigens, which the patient’s immune system learns to respond to.
How would a tumour have a different DNA to the patient?
Cancerous cells have mutated DNA which may make them recognisable..
On the bread v. pharma issue, if you get the wrong drugs then paradoxically you might be toast.
CRISPR-Cas9 makes it possible to construct the relevant RNA/DNA strands for a few tens of dollars — you can effectively “dial them up” on a computer; the delivery mechanism is similarly cheap (depending on how widely you want it replicated in the body). This is basically how the Covid vaccines were created.
(There is even the potential to alter the DNA in every body cell — yes, men could genetically become women. Obviously there are some ethical problems with something this powerful — especially in the realm of foetal engineering.)
Anyway, the problem with personalised medicine is not the tech or the cost of the tech: it is the regulatory regime — something that the U.K. MRHA has acknowledged and is working on proposals to address.
DK
IIRC Moderna had tried for about a decade to make treatments for various cancers using mRNA. They had not managed to get a single treatment through testing. This is for treatments for people who would be fairly sick already mind you.
They were having some difficulties with money.
Then they suddenly made a completely safe and effective vaccine in about 6 months to inject literally billions of people with, most of them healthy – which is the state of people you want to use vaccines on.
Hm.
“Do we not have charity sector, the state and state funded universities who wish to help out on that? After all isn’t it the bods in those sectors who are usually bitching about big pharma? Let them lead by example.”
Part of the problem is that the medical ‘profession’ is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Big Pharma. So when you go to doctor with problem the solution you get given is a pill, that makes the drug companies money. A solution that only requires a better diet, lifestyle changes, maybe some supplements, or a cheap, safe old drug will not even be considered, because it doesn’t make anyone money.
I know it makes me sound tin foil, but I don’t plan to listen to doctors any more. Covid has made me consider they are charlatans who just say whatever they are told to by either the State or the drug companies, whoever pays best. They certainly don’t have the patient’s best interests at heart.
« the delivery mechanism is similarly cheap (depending on how widely you want it replicated in the body). This is basically how the Covid vaccines were created.»
You want it localised to the injection site and it ends up hey presto in your viscera for just a few dollars. Bargain!
The claim the jab only got mRNA into dendritic cells is stuff and nonsense. It goes wherever it gets to in the circulation and is expressed in unknowable quantities in unknowable places for essentially unknowable time.
Tim you are essentially correct.
Plus given just how deadly melanomas are the risks of this new treatment are trivial by comparison
mRNA vaccines don’t modify a patient’s RNA or DNA
They do, it’s been proved in many studies
Next you’ll be claiming they don’t Cause cancer. Current approved narative is the UPFs we’ve been eating since 1960s are why cancer and turbo-cancer have surged world wide in all age groups since mRNA jabs rolled out in 2021
Angus Dalgliesh, Karol Sikora and mRNA inventor Robert Malone have been openly warning of mRNA cancer since mid 2021
Pharma: our mRNA Covid jab gave you skin cancer, take this mRNA jab to cure it. We’ll have an mRNA jab for the colon cancer it gave you ready soon
Firstly taking of not taking vaccines should be a matter of individual choice ( with a few caveats)
Would I take a vaccine for the big standard low risk skin cancers I get burnt off my face , probably no
Would I risk a vaccine treatment for really deadly cancers like melanomas or pancreatic cancer, definitely yes
PS the very first of these immune treatments for a cancer was and is the BCG vaccine ( dates back to the 80s)
BCG is actually a vaccine against TB but if injected into the bladder it somehow causes an immune response to bladder cancer cells. If the cancer has not spread, has not got past the bladder wall it’s incredibly effective. Side effects are big but fairly short lived.
My wife is god bless, alive because it works.
And since when did taking a drug when you have an ailment become ‘a vaccine’? If you have cancer and you take a drug to try and get rid of it thats a treatment, not a vaccine. A cancer vaccine would be something you took BEFORE being diagnosed with cancer to prevent you getting it.
No wonder the medical profession is about as trusted these days as estate agents. In fact I think I’d trust an estate agent more. At least they don’t try to kill me to make more money for the house builders.
“A vaccine” can be thought of – perhaps not wholly accurately, but good enough for colloquial – as something that primes the immune system to attack “this stuff”. In that sense this is a perfectly fair usage.
can be thought of
perhaps not wholly accurately
but good enough for colloquial
John McEnroe’s verbal challenge to your definition, Tim.
““A vaccine” can be thought of – perhaps not wholly accurately, but good enough for colloquial – as something that primes the immune system to attack “this stuff”. ”
Yes, BEFORE you catch the disease. Not after. Otherwise taking vitamin C when you have a cold is a vaccine.
As far as I know the BCG vaccine was and is only given to people who already have TB.
BCG was around for years before it was discovered that it somehow worked for bladder cancer.
I think the point of these things is , if a treatment
stimulates the immune system into attacking whatever ‘ baddie ‘, for a reasonably long period,then it is near enough to being a vaccine for pragmatic purposes.
I think the more strict term for these things is something like :immune therapy
The claim the jab only got mRNA into dendritic cells is stuff and nonsense
I didn’t mean to make that claim
expressed in unknowable quantities in unknowable places for essentially unknowable time
I don’t know what you mean by this. Since mRNA vaccines have been given to very many people, and don’t convey immortality, it’s quite possible to test, and it has been tested.
From a less well-informed commentator:
…mRNA inventor Robert Malone…
And I’m the Dalai Lama
@TW
A vaccine is known as a drug that prevents one from suffering an infection
@Some of
The claim the jab only got mRNA into dendritic cells is stuff and nonsense
I didn’t mean to make that claim
Nor did Imention it. I rebutted your aseertion mRNA vaccines don’t modify a patient’s RNA or DNA
Since mRNA vaccines have been given to very many people, and don’t convey immortality
Well they sure do shorten life, sometimes to seconds. Instead of expected and normal lower mortallity after an en/pandemic, it’s higher. Excess mortaity higher after 2020 Covid waves and
simultaneous with mRNA jab rollout during 2021. Excess mortality still high in 2022, 23, 24 worldwide
If mRNA inventor was not Robert Malone, who was – citation please
If mRNA inventor was not Robert Malone, who was – citation please
mRNA was invented by nature, or God, according to your beliefs. Its discovery was announced in 1961 with several scientists sharing credit: Malone was an infant at the time.
You probably meant to ask who invented mRNA vaccines. Again, many scientists deserve credit. Lead author on the first paper to describe an mRNA vaccine in vivo was Frédéric Martinon, so if you wanted one name, which you shouldn’t, it could be his. Malone was lead author on an earlier paper describing a significant step along the way, but not actually about vaccines.
For the record, everything else you say is wrong too.