8 ms·
BioNTech CEO applies Covid-19 vaccine's mRNA tech to multiple sclerosis
- wittyreference 6y agoI 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.
- durpkingOP 6y agoPlease provide a link to your thesis.
- BitwiseFool 6y agoDon'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 6y agoThey 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://biontech.de/science/pipeline https://web.archive.org/web/20200128054759/https://biontech....
- stanford_labrat 6y agoSmaller companies here in the bay area as well, see: Rejuvenation Tech.
- aledalgrande 6y agoModerna is too.
- fairity 6y agoIMO, 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.
- darig 6y ago> 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.
- KraftKacke 6y agoNo. The cash helped develop a vaccine this fast, but further application comes with the recent innovation in the lipid nano particles for delivery. That was done before the pandemic.
- cosmodisk 6y agoNot 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.
- refurb 6y agoWe don’t even know if this will work so I wouldn’t feel too bad.
- zuhayeer 6y agoThat undismissible popup that comes up on this page is the bane of my existence
- liquidify 6y agoHeadline 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.
- klmadfejno 6y agoCan anyone comment on where we would be if COVID-19 hit a few years earlier and mRNA wasn't ready for primetime?
- pstrateman 6y agoPretty screwed for at least another year.
- pstrateman 6y agoI appear to have angered the.... I actually don't know.
- spchampion2 6y agoUsing 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-vaccine-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus...
- jghn 6y agoBut if this happened 20 years ago it'd have been before SARS, and thus we would also not have the head start provided by all of that research
- thehappypm 6y agoWe’d be much happier with Astra-Zeneca.
- vondur 6y agoI'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.
- usrusr 6y agoIf this hit 20 years ago I suspect that we wouldn't have perceived anything but the tip of the iceberg of people who actually die or get close, because PCR was much less industrialized back then. And the big invisible "underwater part" of young or lucky people who don't get bad Covid but still serve the virus as transmitter relays would have made it a very strong, short wave. Likely mass graves in every part of the world, but mostly over I think by late summer 2020. And so much individual suffering, because Covid deaths seem to be pretty far from peacefully dozing off. On this scale, which is orthogonal to all the usual metrics, I believe that it's considerably worse than 1918. If this virus had hit us before we got the tools for asymptomatic detection it would have likely lead to quite a few changes in our approach to end of life care, instead of the extra progress we now see in our utilization of the mRNA toolbox.
- WillPostForFood 6y agoGreat 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.
- maxerickson 6y agoGiven 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.).
- pkaye 6y agoWouldn't insurance companies love a lower cost one time treatment?
- rflrob 6y agoI'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.
- djbebs 6y agoDoubtful. 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.
- NickM 6y agoI'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?
- maxerickson 6y agoThe 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.
- altarius 6y agoIt 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.
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- waiseristy 6y agoI 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 6y agoAs 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 6y agoYes, 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 6y ago> 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/premarket-notification-510k https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-submissions/pr...
- tcbawo 6y agoDoes anyone know if this approach would work for food allergies?
- ghc 6y agoAccording to my wife, who is an immunologist working on this same mRNA tech, but applied to cancer, it also has promise in treating allergies -- both the food kind and the kind I have (animals).
- syntaxing 6y agoI 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!).
- cjones26 6y agoI read somewhere recently that CRISPR was actually causing far more accidental mutations than anticipated. Apologies I do not have the source handy, though Google should turn up some information.
- timy2shoes 6y agoCas13 doesn't target DNA, rather targets RNA. It cuts the RNA, which then degraded. See https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0092867420304839 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009286742...
- usehackernews 6y agoCRISPR is a great example of a technology that has not yet made a meaningful economic contribution. Although the technique for editing DNA was discovered in 2012—and a Nobel Prize was awarded to its two discoverers this year—no treatment using CRISPR has been approved outside of clinical trials. So far, its impact has been limited to making researchers more productive—not a bad thing, to be sure, but not close to CRISPR’s full potential. As trials progress, however, I do think some CRISPR treatments will come online in the next few years, especially those targeting genetic disorders that we have very limited means of otherwise treating. From Notes on Technology in the 2020s - Eli Dourado
- yread 6y agoCRISPR most definitely made a huge economic contribution. It's used massively https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=crispr https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=crispr and it allows to do things that would have been very difficult (and expensive, thus providing value) to do otherwise, allowing researchers to do new therapies and diagnostic tools that WERE applied in clinic. That's a bit like saying containers haven't provided meaningful economic contribution because consumers don't use them very often.
- d33lio 6y agoBig Pharma is likely very pro covid vaccine boon, 1) because some got a free loan to fund improvements of their own MRNA tech to catch up to Moderna's 10 year head start and 2) as an excuse to now field their MRNA tech with new vaccines and therapies when in prior years there would have been insurmountable barriers due to the FDA and lack of existing pharmacological precedent.
- linuxhansl 6y agoWhen I first read of the messenger RNA based vaccines I was thinking that perhaps the one good thing coming from this horrific pandemic is providing mRNA treatments the funding they needed. I think originally BioNTech worked on cancer treatments.
- GEBBL 6y agoOh man, this is amazing news. I am surprised at how much promise mRNA has! Let’s hope it will not be too long before awful conditions like MS are consigned to history.
- johanboul 6y agoAfter my Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis, my primary care provider introduced me to RichHerbs Foundation and their MS Formula protocol, the herbal treatment has made a big difference for me. My symptoms including numbness and muscle weakness all disappeared after the treatment plan! Their page is w w w. richherbsfoundation. c o m.
- bitwize 6y agoIn mice, but I'm not a bionerd. Is the MS mouse model closer to the actual human disease than the ALZ mouse model is?
- VEEG889 6y agoI was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis 1 month after I turned fifty. My grandma is ninety-six and had it since she was in her 20s. I have been on WORLDHERBSCLINIC MS HERBAL FORMULA, the first TWO MONTHS was daily and now I am on 3 times a week. It has made a tremendous difference for me. The fatigue never gets to me again. When I do too much, I don’t feel weak anymore..