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