this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
945 points (98.6% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
2809 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 149 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 43 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Holy shit, this is a type of down to earth, factual and enlightening comment that we used to get in reddit! Thanks for this!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you for the kind reaction.

I recently moved from Reddit to Lemmy (same username) and I took my comments with me.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Obligatory: username checks out

Seriously though, thank you!

edit …also: fuck cancer

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (2 children)

They have to manufacture it unique to the individual. Luckily, manufacturing custom mRNA is not very expensive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Especially compared to normal cancer treatment

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago