seems like Covid might end up having a WWII like impact on some technologies. Tons of accelerated R&D triggered by a massive crisis. Would be nice if we could salvage something good out of a bad situation
What doesn't kill your civilization makes it stronger (or cripples it enough that it slowly fades into irrelevance, with nobody agreeing on the exact cause)
I meant civilization as a giant entity that comprises all of us. There is no “your” civilization. The whole grows steadily stronger and more complex, though the constituent ideologies and individuals fight, grow, and die.
IIRC the 14th century was particularly disastrous with both the great famine and the black death wiping out something like 40% and 30% of the population of Europe. In the 17th century the thirty years' war (and associated famines and outbreaks) was similarly devastating.
Capital and also just straight up mindshare. How many people would have had any idea what mRNA was two years ago? Now it's a kitchen table thing, everyone's seen a dozen explainers on what the basic idea is and how it works. It's firmly associated with new technology, agility, and highly effective vaccination.
Unfortunately, it is also at times oversold and this will do a lot of damage. Vaccines are regularly hyped as miracle medication which in turn causes people to stop following lots of other common sense rules, rather than as one arrow in a whole quiver of tools.
Oh definitely, and there's for sure also the likelihood of the name being hijacked for other technologies that are only peripherally related. See also the zillions of cheapo air purifiers prominently branded to contain "HEPA type" filtration.
How long before they would have been commercialized without an epidemic?
Now, is there people greedy enough to start a pandemic or allow it to occur, to accelerate the pay off of this new technology? (I guess there is financial and medical technology incentives to accelerate mRNA technology)
The pandemic gave it the final push in the same way WW2 gave nuclear weapons the last push and the cold war gave rocketry the final push. In all these cases it was pretty well understood that it can work but there were a ton of engineering obstacles to overcome.
They had clinical trials starting in 2013 (rabies), 2016 (Zika), and others. The big thing COVID-19 did was rapidly accelerate large-scale testing — normally you have to wait for people to get sick so you can show that the vaccinated population was safer – and get massive investments in scaling up manufacturing capacity. That last part will be the most enduring benefit since engineers rarely get worse at making things and a new vaccine would be starting with a known platform and well-established costs — I’m sure that someone at Moderna, Pfizer/BioNTech, etc. can now give you very accurate estimates for how much money and time it’ll take to make a given number of doses.
Why are you so sure about that? From what I saw in last year’s Moderna presentation on R&D day they ramped up vaccines for other infections _because_ it worked so well for COVID, but they were focusing more on therapeutics before, as they thought there’s more money in it and less in preventing infections with vaccines.
My understanding is that the only reason this worked for mRNA is that it was basically already at the end point of the development cycle of figuring out which disease to apply it to. It was just waiting for patients to demonstrate efficacy and safety. COVID-19 provided that opportunity. This is not a repeatable model for other new technologies though. Now that mRNA safety has been proven out, the hurdles to applying it to other things are drastically reduced (as they would have been once the first mRNA drug got approved).
Similarly, having a ready population pool and an urgent need is not likely to come up again although maybe mRNA drugs in general have a safety profile that might warrant giving them to patients who have no other alternative.
It should probably be noted here that for the mRNA vaccines, the only reason that the trials seemed accelerated is that they were able to find so many infected participants, and so were able to reach their stated endpoints more quickly.
I’m not so sure about that. People worked all day and night and through weekends, were much more flexible with streaming data instead of getting it in one big package after it all arrived. I’m extremely thankful for all people who took part in letting me seeing my parents again without masks.
This is not the same thing as the BioNTech/ModeRNA treatment. This is gene therapy on T-cells. The mRNA is used here to produce a functional protein within the T-cells themselves, not a protein to recognize and attack.
Its insane how powerful and complex the immune system is, it is nowhere nearly fully understood. It can fire against anything detected to be hostile, false alarms causing auto immune diseases. Being able to take snippets of something, e.g. any cancera person gets and telling it "fight" would be the holy grail :)
Not trying to be cheeky: How many millions of citizens here in the U.S. will abstain from a potential cancer vaccine if based off this research? Would the same religious/tribal objections be held, for example, if the disease to be prevented was cancer vs a virus of unknown origin? Would it still be viewed by so many as a political/big-pharma conspiracy ("But where did the cancer come from?" etc.)?
I think that's less problematic as you can't infect someone with cancer if you have it. But my guess is you are right. Although I will say that suspicious people are occasionally right. Trusting science has a proven track record, but it doesn't have a 100% shooting percentage, so I would be ok with not having a debate there.
The point is that we currently have a vaccine that eradicates those types of cancers but we have very low numbers of people willing to take the vaccine because of cultural hesitancy
I would quibble with your definition of "very low", given that the number is >50% in the US.
I agree we have a preventative treatment for a cancer and not everyone takes it. What conclusions do you draw from this point as it relates to this thread (or in general)?
Personally, I'm surprised that uptake is so fast for a relatively new and elective treatment. Even moreso when considering that it addresses a rare disease that effects people many decades later.
Do you have a source for that? Because my understanding is that even in young people (the original CDC target for the vaccine), the vaccination rate is under 50% in the US.
Here is a more recent link from the CDC that puts it at 75% started and 58% complete for adolescents.[1]
This isn't surprising because the CDC shows adoption going up a few percent per year. This year over year increase is more or less what you would expect given we are still in the adoption phase of this new medicine.[2] Eventually this increase will stall out with some people refusing to use it, but we aren't there yet.
You can transmit it to those you have sex with. That's a pretty narrow means of transmission, and one that is already a vector for a variety of other diseases.
You’re right. If science was never questioned, you would still be drinking cocaine, giving your kids cough syrup laced with heroin, spraying people with DDT, and smoking the cigarette brand your doctor recommended.
If it demonstrably cures diagnosed cancer I think most people will not hesitate, especially for cancers that have a high mortality and/or few other treatment options.
If it's proposed as a vaccine for cancer that you don't have yet, there would be more hesitancy.
The HPV vaccine is proven to prevent cervical, throat, and other cancers. Uptake outside of a few developed countries is woefully low considering the benefit.
"that parental intent not to vaccinate their adolescents against HPV rose from 50.4 percent in 2012 to 64 percent in 2018. Many parents resisted the vaccine despite their doctors’ recommendations, Dr. Sonawane said. Ironically, parents were most resistant — at 68.1 percent — to vaccinating girls, the very group for whom this vaccine was initially developed to prevent cervical cancer."
When the research showed it was useful for men (in both self- and other-protection regards), it was still not an easy task to get my doctor to prescribe it for me. Zero hesitation on my part to get it, even with the extremely high price tag.
I got it for my daughter the instant she was eligible last year, because cervical cancer is awful and it seemed stupid not to.
My experience suggests that it was something the doctor's office wasn't actively pushing -- they made it known that it was available without me having to ask, but it was presented very much as a "do you want to?" thing, rather than as part of the "of course you'll be getting this" set of earlier vaccines.
Then it was sort of a pain to actually get, because it required an extra doctor visit for the second shot in the series.
HPV is most commonly known for being a cause of cervical cancer, but it can lead to other sorts of cancer that men are also prone to. HPV vaccines are good for everyone!
My trump loving father-in-law tried to deny my niece from getting the HPV vaccine because it would 'increase promiscuity'. It's literally a cure for cancer and they don't care.
The logic of "I'll make sure my minor child doesn't have sex with the threat of an untreatable STD and substantially higher lifetime risk of cancer" is so incredibly insane to me
I have a hard time empathizing on any level.
Seems akin to "I'm going to forbid my child from wearing a seatbelt to ensure they pay attention while they drive."
People have a belief that they can just tough out COVID, and so the vaccine is a long-term-risk tradeoff: suffer unknown side-effects of the vaccine, or maybe die of this disease that my friend had and recovered from?
This immunotherapy is cotemporal with "traditional" immunological and chemo treatments, so the mortality calculus is different: "Suffer potential unknown side-effects of an mRNA therapy or content myself with that 'three months' number the doctor gave me?"
> Not trying to be cheeky: How many millions of citizens here in the U.S. will abstain from a potential cancer vaccine if based off this research? Would the same religious/tribal objections be held, for example, if the disease to be prevented was cancer vs a virus of unknown origin? Would it still be viewed by so many as a political/big-pharma conspiracy ("But where did the cancer come from?" etc.)?
So this misses the full Covid-19 vaccine critique and provides a disturbing slant instead of the proposed hazards. The specific critique is that the protein chosen in C19 vaccines is in fact dangerous in its own right.
mRNA as a mechanism of delivering a protein to the body is anything but an empirical debate -- the tech works, and works decently well for risk profiles who have no other option. The philosophical / duty of care debate is whether or not the risks associated with mRNA therapies / vaccines are worth the inherent risks.
Equating Covid 19 for the common person as the same as cancer for the common person doesn't appear to balance. If C19 had cancer mortality rates, this pandemic would look drastically different -- with far few people in the room.
I tend to think the abstinence rate would be much lower than with the vaccine.
Cancer scares people in a way that COVID doesn't.
Many of the anti-vaxxers do not perceive COVID as a credible risk, so they let their contrarian/anti-authoritarian/"don't tell me what to do" instincts kick in, because none of it actually matters to them in their mind.
When faced with a form of cancer that has a <10% survival rate they will shut up and take the mRNA treatment in a heartbeat.
I agree. It'd be the same with Covid too if the risk was high. Ultimately the reason so many don't want a Covid vaccine is because the risk of hospitalization is only 1.6% and is well below 1% if you're young and otherwise healthy. Or if you already had Covid and have natural immunity you're about as protected as the vaccinated (<1% chance of hospitalization).
If the risk of hospitalization or death was 10%? 30%? Almost everyone would want the vaccine except the real hardcore anti-vaxxers. You wouldn't have to mandate or otherwise coerce people to take something if the threat was that credible generally. Few resist the smallpox vaccine, for example.
The threat is very credible. Just as the misinformation and bullshit campaign is very powerful. To the point where even a credible threat isn't enough to get people to act in their own best interest. With odds approaching 1:400 across the whole population of death and substantially higher of a serious bout of disease it is quite amazing how many people continue to downplay this because of the age factor.
If the odds were that good for the lottery I'd be playing.
The fear campaign is very powerful too. People radically overestimate the risk. A large % of the population overestimates it by 48.4%!
"For unvaccinated hospitalization risk, 2% of Democrats responded correctly, compared with 16% of Republicans. In fact, 41% of Democrats replied that at least 50% of unvaccinated people have been hospitalized due to COVID-19."
The problem is that many people who think that they are 'healthy' without comorbidities that make covid worse are, quite frankly, deluded.
"Nearly 40% of American adults aged 20 and over are obese. 71.6% of adults aged 20 and over are overweight, including obesity." (National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, 2017-2018; Harvard School of Public Health, 2020).
So 71.6% of American adults are at elevated risk for severe Covid. Because even just being overweight increases your risk of hospitalization if you get it.
So IF the unvaccinated have the same demographic profile as general US adults, then 71.6% have an elevated risk of hospitalization if they catch Covid because they are overweight and unvaccinated.
You will notice that there is no political affiliation in that conclusion. Also, risk is not actuality, and levels of comorbidities vary from person to person, so population risks and personal risks are different.
Now, as to how many have actually had covid and been hospitalized I will admit that there is a perception difference based on political affiliation. But for that data, I will respect the actual statistics, not my perception based on displayed attitudes.
Basically, the problem is that a lot of adults think that they aren't fat, or don't know they have high cholesterol, etc. and are declining the vaccine because they are 'healthy'.
I personally don't know anyone that abstains from MMR/polio/chickenpox vaccines. I think this whole anti-anti-vaxxer meme has really got people riled up and ignoring just how many people are already taking vaccines. over 92% of kids have 3 doses of polio vaccine by the time they're 24 months according to the CDC. Something tells me that number gets much higher with just another year or two.
It's a sad day for honest debate when being skeptical of an item gets you labeled as being "anti" an entire category of things to which that item belongs.
To be clear I don't think your question is expressly stating that anti-vaxxers are a big concern, but if there's a genuine concern that a vaccine is well established to work, an incredibly large majority of people take it in the U.S. so I don't think the concern is warranted.
People look for an enemy to direct their frustration about the Problem of Evil, chaos, impersonal viruses etc. Classic scapegoat behaviour. the pattern has been repeated throughout history. Usually the scapegoats become at least oppressed.
It's also clear that the authorities are not pushing this meme more than the people. Which is also a characteristic and one where some in charge are capitalising on.
Interestingly its also fear and worry at the root of this is the same as the "antis" and their scapegoat is those above us. Others capitalise on this too.
We've had clusters of measles in Wales a few years ago, that were due to vaccine scepticism driving down vaccination rates below herd-immunity levels. That was a real event, that took more than a year to correct. And then you have all the circus they've built around COVID19.
Antivaxxers are real, downplaying the risk they pose is dangerous.
Over-amplifying the risk is dangerous. Wales, according to [1] has had well over 94% MMR vaccination since 2012. The herd immunity threshold for measles is >95%, which is very unique to measles since it's so much more contagious, but to blame anti-vaxxers for that incomplete vaccinated status seems like a likely wrong conclusion. Getting a 100% willing population to 100% vaccination status is _hard_. I see anti-anti-vaxxers everywhere, what I don't see is any evidence or solutions coming from that group, just people whining that "the others" are causing problems.
2012 is when the cluster happened, which triggered a wave of people rushing to vaccinate. Before that, for about 20 years, the Wakefield-generated disinformation pushed vaccination rates in kids down to alarming levels, which inevitably resulted in problems. "Widespread sensationalist British media reports of the initial Wakefield studies led to a decline of public confidence in the combined vaccine [20]. Following the controversy, initial dose uptake fell from 95% in 1995 to ~80% in 2003 [21]. Herd immunity was therefore compromised, and measles cases began to rise sharply from 2007. However, uptake improved once more in the mid-2000s (with occasional outbreaks), following several successive ‘catch-up’ campaigns in which individuals who were not vaccinated on time were invited to get vaccinated, along with a gradual restoration of public trust [16]. By 2014, the UK ended endemic transmission of measles". https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8073967/
The problem is not getting vaccination rates close to 100%, but actually staying there when people stop seeing why it is important to vaccinate. It's entirely a communication problem, and legitimizing antivaxxer stances makes the problem worse.
> legitimizing antivaxxer stances makes the problem worse.
Do you believe what I've posted legitimizes antivaxxers stance? If so, what specifically have I said that does such?
Speaking of the dangers of over amplifying the fear, MMR vaccines have been delayed 6+ months for 2 million kids according to the UN if I recall correctly. This is due to disproportionate fear being spread around covid. Measles is hands-down worse than covid for kids. This is the effect of scaring everyone away from hospitals rather than having rational risk/benefit analysis conversations.
> If so, what specifically have I said that does such?
>> but to blame anti-vaxxers for that incomplete vaccinated status seems like a likely wrong conclusion
It isn't the wrong conclusion! Press-spread antivax paranoia post-Wakefield was directly responsible for rates falling under safety levels! The reasons it hit harder in Wales are due to additional factors (lower educational levels, higher isolation, higher culture of distrust of (English) authority, etc etc), but there is absolutely no question that the fall in vaccination rates was due to the dawn of antivaxxers.
That MMR vaccines have been delayed as result of lockdowns is tragic and should absolutely be fixed as soon as possible, of course. That's the case for any health-related procedure, we know the logistical impact of lockdowns has been massive - my son finally managed to get a dermatologist appointment in England after 10 months of waiting... The only way out of this state of things is to take Covid19 vaccination rates as close to 100% as possible, so that we can really turn it into "just a flu". Antivaxxers are an obstacle to this and should NOT be legitimized in any way, if we want to go back to a situation where we can safely prioritize other illnesses again.
> Antivaxxers are an obstacle to this and should NOT be legitimized in any way
agreed, but also anti-anti-vaxxers are an obstacle that sensationalize and demonize rather than converse and educate.
> The only way out of this state of things is to take Covid19 vaccination rates as close to 100% as possible
This is incorrect. We have 200+ viruses that are endemic and likely can't be eradicated with vaccines (at least not with modern tech). Even if the vaccine was effective at preventing transmission (it isn't, if it has any benefit it's marginal and the U.S. federal government even went on record during a court hearing admitting just as much) it certainly has no hope of preventing transmission in all of the many animals that are transmitters.
> if we want to go back to a situation where we can safely prioritize other illnesses again
This is the danger I'm talking about, there is no "going back" - we should be safely prioritizing every disease at all times _especially_ during a time of mass panic. No ones fear or mass panic should determine how we approach medicine, that should be obvious to everyone, but fear kills rationality. Someones fear of covid, for example, should never take precedence over someones cancer. Being more scared of something does not merit getting priority for anything.
> Someones fear of covid, for example, should never take precedence over someones cancer
I'm sorry but I strongly disagree there, and I don't think we'll ever be able to reconcile our views in that area. With all due respect to cancer patients everywhere, civilization can survive with current rates of cancer much better than it can survive with high ratios of unchecked covid. And that determines priority.
> This is incorrect. We have 200+ viruses that are endemic
You are either repeating a talking point or failed to read my comment. The point of vaccination is to remove the likelihood of death and severe outcomes, turning covid into a flu, not necessarily to eradicate it. If we push vaccination rates high enough, this is achievable; but we can only do that if antivaxxers are not legitimized. Once covid really is just a flu, then we're more or less back to 2018.
I hate to be "you have to choose a side", but when it comes to health issues that can dramatically affect the whole population, I get draconian. Every time you contest or argue against the vaccination effort, willingly or unwillingly you are on the side of antivaxxers.
I personally don't know anyone who voted for Trump. Who you know is not a representative sample. There are lots of vaccine deniers and they occasionally cause problems.
What are these problems you speak of? We have countries like Gibraltar which has been 100% vaccinated since April of this year, they continue to have case spikes. It's indisputable that the vaccine doesn't prevent transmission and recently in a court of law the Federal government went on record saying it lacked evidence that it even slowed transmission. That's why the courts overruled the CMS vaccine mandates in so many states.
Personally, I think this vaccine has done a great deal of harm reduction and I'm glad people in at-risk categories have access to it, but pretending there is some big social consequence for these people not taking the vaccine is ill-informed. They might be hurting themselves, but literally no one who is alive for the next few years will escape being attacked by covid. Because no one will escape covid, there is no logic behind suggesting people refusing vaccinations is a social consequence. It's a personal consequence alone.
non-immunized people are more likely to end up in the hospital or have longer hospital stays. full hospitals result in deaths of immunized people. long hospital stays of non-immunized people drive up medical costs for everyone. etc.
we live in a society. basically all choices impact others.
this is some very dangerous misinformation. US hospitals were quite a bit less full in 2020 than projected back in 2019 (projections using pre-pandemic data). If hospitals are filling up today (I've not seen much data for 2021) then it most certainly isn't the unvaccinated to blame. You can't blame a minority of the population that remains unvaccinated in 2021 for hospital capacity when the hospitals were under capacity when the entire country was unvaccinated.
> You can't blame a minority of the population that remains unvaccinated in 2021 for hospital capacity
Yes I can. They use a disproportionate share of hospital resources by refusing to get vaccinated. And some hospitals were dangerously full this year (and last year). I know someone who died because their non-emergency procedure was pushed back because of hospital conditions.
And this ignores the vaccines' likely impact on virus spread or costs.
> I know someone who died because their non-emergency procedure was pushed back because of hospital conditions.
I'm sorry to hear this, but let's be clear about what happened here. They did not die because hospitals were full. Even the previous NY mayor has said multiple times their hospitals were never too full to take in patients.
I also lost a couple people due to hospital failures. I don't blame anyone, it was and is a tough period, but if we did not instill mass panick we wouldn't be in the situation we are in today. Hospital capacity is _shrinking_ nationally. For the first time in decades medical staff employment was on a decline. In 100 years historians will look back and baffle at how a medical emergency made the US decrease our capacity in healthcare across the board. A virus did not make this happen. Panic made this happen. My partners dad died many decades before he should have because he got really bad covid, was put on a ventilator, cleared covid and was recovering for a couple of weeks and then the ventilator failed and the nursing was so understaffed they didn't check on him until he was already brain dead.
There is no doubt in my mind that had that hospital not decreased the wages of some 30% of their staff (leading to a huge exodus of workers) because society demanded they shutdown profitable procedures - my partners dad would no doubt be alive and healthy today.
This particular hospital never approached max capacity even once during 2020. This was purely the repercussions of panic affecting healthcare.
Holding all other things equal the lack of full population vaccination makes the situation work. There were plenty of hospitals that were near or at capacity. Whatabouting about other decisions or trends is irrelevant to our discussion about whether "1) a significant fraction of the population is anti-vax 2) this has negative affects on others".
It was a self-fulfilling prophecy. If anti-vaxxers would not have been declared a threat to humanity and health, you can expect that overall rates would be much higher than they are now. Instead people made really bad arguments and people refused on principle. Suggestion for mandates will do the rest and probably will negatively affect uptake for decades. It is a very predictive behavior.
People turn to pseudo-scientific stuff as a last resort (or the only) as well, so I would not necessarily say they would not get the vaccine if it might be their last hope.
1. This is article is describing a therapy, not prevention. Your sensibilities will be influenced if you already have a deadly illness.
2. This would be a choice and not a mandate, like chemotherapy is today. Or at least I imagine it would be.
I'm sure many anti vaxxers who've died from covid would've accepted the vaccine on their death beds if it improved their chances of fighting the disease at that point.
It depends 100% on if the conservative media and figureheads like Trump think they can make hay out of turning any given medical treatment into a way to oppose liberals. Let's hope they can't.
As someone who is very anti-COVID vaccinations, my problem with it isn't the vaccine itself or the underlying technology so much as it's been the plethora of other issues associated with it. The normal processes for drug approval were bypassed and so as a result we have very limited safety data and no long-term >5yr safety data at all.
With something like this, I would expect it to go through those trials and see that we'd have some sort of safety data and further research.
Again, I am actually very positive about mRNA therapies—I just want them to be fully tested and vetted first.
Yes, though it is funny how until it became a political issue, virtually no one knew anything about the processes by which new drugs made their way into their body.
It's important to correct this misinformation and point out that "normal processes" were followed. The long approval process delayed the roll out of the vaccine causing hundreds of thousands of needless deaths. If anything, the approval should have gone faster.
There were no clinical trials. There is no safety data. Perfectly healthy young people have reported heart problems after getting it.
Let's face it: anyone who takes it is participating in an experiment. It may be that the risks are OK for a lot of people. But obviously there is more to discover.
The problem, of course, is that vaccinations don't _end_ pandemics.
If they did, some places would likely be completely free of COVID. However, they are not.
They lessen the effects but many people have pointed out that this whole thing is entirely new territory: We have a flu "vaccination" but the flu us just something people learn to live with.
We have never——ever——forced mass vaccination against a viral respiratory infection. Because we cannot vaccinate it away. COVID is here to stay and I (personally) don't think anything will happen until people contract it enough to get a good natural immunity and then things will go away.
I hope so! ~50% of people in a developed country get cancer within their lifetime and they cost our healthcare system the most (other than, err, very sick elderly people).
If this works safely and reliably, then this is like doubling or 5x'ing our healthcare budget over 5 years.
I wouldn't mind if people could opt-out of mRNA cancer treatment, but then they have to pay for every other cancer treatment option (and all doctor visits) out of pocket.
>Obesity affects 19% of children and 42% of adults, putting people at risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers. Over a quarter of all Americans 17 to 24 years are too heavy to join the military. Obesity costs the US health care system $147 billion a year.
Would slimming medication (meth) mandates be reasonable too or should a doctor consultation be necessary beforehand? To assess the risk of slimming down too fast, pre existing conditions, et cetera.
I think the news is the fact that a non-profit, non-affiliated (w/ Moderna) organization has additional supporting evidence for mRNA therapy for cancer patients who weren't responding to treatment otherwise.
Not every piece of news needs to shake the world to the core.
it could be that this is public research vs private?
It's quite exciting to see this scientific discovery having such widespread use, don't you agree? The research is around the [NKG7 protein][1], not sure what Moderna targets.
Sure the more therapeutics use modern platforms, the better it is for humanity, I just wish these articles were written more similar to how a human would want me to understand the differences between approaches instead of trying to make a PR article.
It's a bug deal that they found out about the importance of the NKG7 gene, but the whole article doesn't have a reference to it.
Moderna's personal vaccine is different, as it sequences the cancer itself as far as I know.
My thoughts exactly. According to the Moderna pipeline [0], they're already on phase II trials for their cancer vaccine, which to me seems much more exciting than a proof-of-concept if that's what this is.
And that’s why reproducibility studies aren’t a thing. People say “yeah that’s old news!” We need to fund independent validation. Especially knowing that private companies could massage the data to get to market.
Correct it is to help T-cells identify existing cancer cells, because current immunotherapy isn't all that great (cancer cells are tricky!).
>> Next, the researchers employed new sequencing technology that makes a mRNA-based change of primary immune cells possible. They identified the target gene in single-cell RNA-sequencing datasets. Then they performed a functional test to validate the role of the target gene in enhanced immune cell-mediated killing of tumor cells.
This is important because cancer cells have different properties that enable it to sneak past T-cells. So they are trying to identify specific characteristics to tumor cells that enable them to make mRNA that then is used to shape T-cell behavior.
These vaccines can also be used (hopefully) to prevent metastasis, which is the true killer behind most cancers. Getting the body's immune system to respond is key. It could be seen as a prevention against spread in the body.
You are right that it’s not a vaccine, but you are wrong about the definition of a vaccine. Moderna’s personlized cancer vaccine triggers the immune system in a different way than this therapeutic.
,,Vaccines can be prophylactic (to prevent or ameliorate the effects of a future infection by a natural or "wild" pathogen), or therapeutic (to fight a disease that has already occurred, such as cancer.’’
