[HN Gopher] BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to...
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BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple
sclerosis
Author : miljen
Score : 133 points
Date : 2021-01-12 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.fiercebiotech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.fiercebiotech.com)
| syntaxing wrote:
| I really hope this mRNA train keeps going and companies succeed
| executing on it. Does anyone know the status for CRISPR medical
| technology? I remembering hearing about all these great
| applications using CaaS-9 and 13 but I haven't really heard any
| new medical breakthroughs recently (though the hemophilia "cure"
| was awesome!).
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Can anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few
| years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?
| vondur wrote:
| I'd assume the traditional route of using virus particles for
| the vaccine would be used. In fact, I think that's what the
| Chinese and Russians are using.
| pstrateman wrote:
| Pretty screwed for at least another year.
| spchampion2 wrote:
| Using a vaccine created by one of the many other mechanisms
| that are in the pipeline, like the Oxford or J&J vaccines.
|
| https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...
| thehappypm wrote:
| We'd be much happier with Astra-Zeneca.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| Great news! I wonder how much industry resistance there will be.
| Treating MS patients is a massive industry. Drug treatments are
| $100k a year currently, replacing that with a single $20 vaccine
| would be disruptive in the best way.
| pkaye wrote:
| Wouldn't insurance companies love a lower cost one time
| treatment?
| djbebs wrote:
| Doubtful. Insurances dont run at a loss, every penny that
| goes into them they take a cut as profits. If the treatment
| is expensive, great! More demand for their product, and even
| if their cut is the same, their profit and revenue will be
| greater.
| rflrob wrote:
| I'm sure they would, but bear in mind that the costs are
| likely going to be much higher for an MS vaccine than for
| nCov2, due to the economies of scale that the latter has.
| Insurance companies will still probably love a one-time
| $20,000 (or whatever number they can justify) treatment
| compared to ongoing costs.
| belltaco wrote:
| Where does it say it'd be only $20 ?
| maxerickson wrote:
| Given that it doesn't suppress the immune system as much as
| existing treatments, other parties will likely tell them to go
| away (patients, doctors, insurance, etc.).
| phnofive wrote:
| Avonex is off patent - still profitable, but drug companies are
| not entirely insensitive to being displaced by breakthroughs.
| NickM wrote:
| I've re-read the article a couple of times but I'm having trouble
| understanding how this works. I understand how an mRNA vaccine
| can teach the immune system to recognize a virus, but in the case
| of an autoimmune disorder, the challenge is to teach the immune
| system to _stop_ attacking something, right?
|
| How can an mRNA vaccine cause the immune system to "forget"
| something that it thinks is harmful?
| folli wrote:
| Derek Lowe, as usual, explains this quite nicely:
| https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/01/12/mo...
|
| To quote:
|
| One goal has been to try to selectively affect autoreactive T
| cells, but that's a lot easier said than done. The regulatory T
| cells and regulatory B cells are key players in immune
| tolerance, the "friend or foe" recognition system that keeps
| our own immune systems from attacking everything in sight. If
| you could present some of the antigens involved to those cells
| in a way that they accepted them as normal human proteins
| rather than as an external threat, you could presumably turn
| down their response.
|
| BioNTech and others have been trying to target the population
| of lymphoid antigen-presenting cells, known to be very
| important in immune tolerance mechanisms, but without setting
| off any of the general inflammation pathways. They have a
| liposomal formulation that when injected into the muscle tissue
| seems to end up almost entirely in the lymphatic system, and
| they've been doing all sorts of modifications to the RNA
| payload (such as replacement of uridine with
| methylpseudouridine) to make it as non-immunogenic by itself as
| possible. The liposome lipids themselves are also chosen to be
| as non-immunogenic as possible, too - the coronavirus mRNA
| vaccines actually get an adjuvant boost from such properties,
| but you don't want that in this case.
| altarius wrote:
| It reads like the immune isn't forgetting anything, they just
| "flood" the system with the proteins that the antibodies would
| normally attack in nerve cells or brain, thus giving the
| antibodies another target to "keep them busy".
|
| It sounds like they are creating large quantities of the
| "offending" protein via the vaccine mNRA mechanism in normal
| cells. Normally the antibodies/T-cells would attack the myelin
| coating of nerves and the brain but with the protein being
| abundantly available anywhere the immune cells are "kept
| occupied" and leave nerves and brain alone.
|
| If this treatment works as I understand, you would need
| continuous refreshers each time the mRNA injection is depleted.
| zionic wrote:
| Not an expert, but wouldn't the abundance of target proteins
| cause a dangerously elevated immune response?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Not an expert, but wouldn't the experts have thought of
| that too, and wouldn't it likely show up in animal studies?
| pietjepuk88 wrote:
| In a sense it sounds a bit like immunotherapy for allergies.
| That is typically about injecting pathogens into your body
| (e.g. under your tongue, under your skin, or in your lymph
| nodes), and then over time teaching your body that these
| pathogens are harmless.
|
| As far as _why_ that works instead of sending someone into
| anaphylactic shock... -\\_(tsu)_/- The immune system is weird
| and complex, and I guess that's why they want a medical
| specialist around in case you're one of the unlucky ones. (Only
| the first time with sublingual tablets as far as I know)
| maxerickson wrote:
| The vaccine (or vaccine product, not sure which) targets the
| cells that modulate the immune response.
|
| If I understand correctly, it gets the cells to produce the
| same autoantigen that they are misidentifying, which causes
| them to slow that activity.
| wittyreference wrote:
| I came up with the same idea for treating autoimmune disease
| years ago - in my first year of med school, actually. Back then
| the platform for doing this elegantly via mRNA didn't really
| exist, though, and I didn't want to drop out of med school to
| spend a half-decade or more in grad school proving the concept
| the clumsy way.
|
| I'm really glad that it's finally come to fruition, but I
| definitely feel a bit of regret that I have come to embody the
| "ideas are cheap, execution matters" truism.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Don't feel too bad, the execution depended on a massive world-
| changing pandemic where funding flowed freely and normal
| economics just didn't apply.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| They were working on applying mRNA technology to other
| diseases, including (and in particular) cancer, well before
| the pandemic. While it is true that they have received
| significant funding this year, they had a $7.6B market cap on
| Dec 31, 2019 and were already conducting several clinical
| studies for mRNA-based medicine [1].
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20200128054759/https://bionte
| ch....
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| Smaller companies here in the bay area as well, see:
| Rejuvenation Tech.
| darig wrote:
| > normal economics just didn't apply.
|
| It wasn't the economics that didn't apply... it was the
| safety protocols and ethics surrounding the processes of
| altering the genetics of human tissue.
| fairity wrote:
| IMO, the healthier coping mechanism is to realize that the
| path you take in life will never be the most optimal. We all
| make mistakes, and if all we care about is extrinsic
| achievement, we'll be either steeped in regret (or perhaps,
| blissfully ignorant). Instead of being outcome dependent, try
| to value things that are by nature, intrinsic.
| durpkingOP wrote:
| Please provide a link to your thesis.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| Not to worry! When I was a little kid, I couldn't afford new
| shiny magazines,so I had an idea of an online library hosting
| all the magazines for a small monthly fee. Guess what, turns
| out apps like Readly doing exactly that.
| tcbawo wrote:
| Does anyone know if this approach would work for food allergies?
| zuhayeer wrote:
| That undismissible popup that comes up on this page is the bane
| of my existence
| liquidify wrote:
| Headline is a bit funky calling it "Covid-19 vaccine's tech",
| since this tech has been studied and tested for many other
| applications.
|
| It seems backwards... Covid-19 vaccine is an instance of this
| technology, the technology is not a derivative of what they did
| in Covid-19 vaccine.
| baq wrote:
| Casually backwards but the audience can relate better this way.
| waiseristy wrote:
| I haven't yet seen anyone mention this, but will BioNTech's /
| Modernas mRNA vaccine need to go through phase 1-3 trials when
| encoding for other proteins?
|
| The greatest advancement with mRNA is that you can have a vaccine
| in under a month. But that doesn't help if for each new mRNA
| encoding you need 9 months worth of health & safety trials.
| okl wrote:
| As I've understood, (correct me if I'm wrong) one of the main
| concerns is that you end up with a protein that interferes with
| other functions of the body in unexpected ways. So I guess it
| would be prudent to go through phase 1-3 trials again.
| pg_bot wrote:
| Yes, they will have to go through health and safety trials for
| each additional vaccine developed using this technology. No one
| gets special treatment when it comes to FDA approval, and this
| is the way it should be.
|
| You can get fast tracked if you show superior effectiveness,
| meet an unmet medical need, or get rid of serious side effects
| of an existing therapy. We should look at ways to speed up this
| process, (in the grand scheme of things 9 months isn't that
| long to wait to cure a disease) not eliminate it altogether. If
| we approved something that actually does harm, it will further
| undermine efforts to widely vaccinate the public. We already
| have issues with people trusting vaccines when there is no
| evidence of negative effects, I can't imagine how hard it would
| be if we had another thalidomide on our hands.
| a-dub wrote:
| > Yes, they will have to go through health and safety trials
| for each additional vaccine developed using this technology.
| No one gets special treatment when it comes to FDA approval,
| and this is the way it should be.
|
| true, but there are loopholes. the 510(k) loophole for
| medical devices where any device that is "substantially
| equivalent" to an existing approved device can get fast track
| approval has proved problematic. this has been publicly
| documented both in the press and in independent documentaries
| for some time.
|
| https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-
| submissions/pr...
| jounker wrote:
| Of course they will. The issue is with the things the mRNA
| codes for, and not with the mRNA.
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