I’m not as sure you can do this given there may be an unanticipated side effects, but I think this would work. It’s a new world though for vaccines.
I’m wondering if you can use this approach to create a protein specific to someone’s cancer. Let’s say you got a lung cancer with special protein ABC. Stick that in an mRNA vaccine, let the immune system do work. It’s a decent idea at least imo.
It’d be pretty difficult for cancer. Cancers do often have novel proteins compared with native cells, but most of them would be intracellular, so even if you get an mRNA vaccine for a chunk of one (say, Bcr-Abl, a well-known, oncogenic gene fusion product that wouldn’t be found in normal cells), your immune system isn’t going to bump into it very often except in moot cases (the cancer cell died and lysed, in which case having an immune response to lingering Bcr-Abl isn’t going to kill that cell any deader than it already is). I guess there could be novel surface proteins (cancers can do anything and everything, after all), but there may not be any common targets, which means that finding one would require sequencing and assembling each individual cancer genome for every patient just to find a candidate.
Sounds familiar.
We do see a lot of improvements in therapy with immunomodulation. The best example I can think of is how metastatic melanoma is basically cured by immunomodulation. Suggests to me that there’s a target for at least some of them. You make a good point how most of their abnormal proteins are intracellular though. Would still think there’d be some sort of target that could be hit because I’m stubborn, not because of data.
How is the family part going?
There is all kinds of work and even more speculation as to what can be done out there.
So far so good. Obviously I’ll be masking up and the party will be less a party and more a small gathering.
Am I ponied or did we miss this yesterday? I didn’t see it spelled out that I was myocarditis.
https://twitter.com/nicoleauerbach/status/1341542774395559936?s=21
There can be doubt if it is necessarily from his prior covid infection. But from a public health and responsible governed standpoint doesn’t the assumption need to be made that athletes need to be screened and then rescreened for now (lol shut down sports).
Yeah I am certainly not going to say your idea is impossible, but while cancer isn’t my area of expertise, I know enough that there aren’t any obvious targets analogous to spike such that we could roll out this bad boy on cancer next year.
meant that this was obviously covid myocarditis too. And it is. Fuckers.
Dammit Chile.
.
isn’t the immune system at the crux of some experimental cancer treatments? my understanding was that this was in the works, except the mRNA technique being novel.
eta: read your followup. i couldn’t remember the immunomodulation term.
Something for everybody. Basically says as case density gets high, school transmission increases. Not a big surprise. Fits with the general concept of making decisions to keep community spread down and keep schools safely open. But when the community is effed the schools make it even worse and need to be limited until the community spread is low.
I’m sure this will somehow be controversial. But wth.
https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1341791713187287042?s=21
This caveat is important. What was “high” case density when this study was done is well below where we are now.
https://twitter.com/rmc031/status/1341792326700691462?s=21
Suggest reading the whole twitter thread as well.
The variant has been causing mounting concern in South Africa, where health minister Zweli Mkhize warned that “young, previously healthy people are now becoming very sick”.
He said the country “cannot go through what we went through in the early days of the Aids pandemic”.
https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970259332325383?s=20
https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970261903433731?s=20
https://twitter.com/DrZweliMkhize/status/1339970587104522240?s=20
I mean, I haven’t. Way less tbh.
Are you in South Africa monitoring the new strain? Which is already in France and the UK.
I’ll take the findings of the Health Minister in SA for the time being and see what the UK government conclude
Czech Republic back over 10,000 new cases/day. Over 30% positive cases per day again as well.
Schools might be in full shutdown mode when I get back.
Christian Drosten who is the most public face of the German Covid response was quoted on the radio that he expects that the new variant is already all over Europe and it is only a matter of time before it is detected.
Edited to add: He is not yet concerned about the new variant because there are still multiple possible explanations why it spreads this rapidly.