The great machine of scientific enquiry continues to grind relentlessly along, in spite of the smoking wreckage made, then thrown in its path, by the likes of RFK, Jr. Eventually, I suppose, the republicans will realize that ice-picking the tendons of American Science just means that some other detestable part of the world will “get ahead of us”  in their endless imaginary fight for dominance.

Any time I see a posting about anything to do with COVID (or now Measles or Hantavirus) on instagram, I can predict there will be swaths of comments claiming that a) there was no virus b) if there was, it was made in China c) If there was and it was made in China, something something Jews. I have taken to thinking of these people as “underpants gnomes” even though the original underpants gnomes were actually funny and had a plan with a discernable output. RFK, Jr would just eat the underpants and blame everything about technological civilization for the fact that he is a very, very creepy old man.

But I saw something really interesting the other day, briefly mentioned on TWiV – apparently human scientists managed to learn a lot from SARS-COV2. One of the things they learned was how to make an RNA package that causes some cells to express patterns that make anti-vaxxers break down into incoherent wailing. No, that’s not it – they trick the cell into producing patterns that mimic a COV2 virus’ spike protein, and the body develops an immune response. With the new immune response, the body is prepared to immediately attack and destroy anything that has the spike protein. And, this works great except for the huge number of anti-vaxxers who know someone who knows someone who totally died of the shot. And I remember talking with some of my buddies and one of them said, soberly, since we were all drinking beer, “this is going to change how we do medicine.” I guess the other shoe is dropping now, and it’s awesome.

[UCL]

A lung cancer patient at UCLH is the first to receive a novel cancer vaccine designed to prime the immune system to recognise and fight cancer cells.

It is the first time this immunotherapy made by BioNTech, the German biotechnology company, will be studied in a clinical trial for lung cancer in the UK, where the NIHR UCLH Clinical Research Facility is the lead research site.

The investigational mRNA cancer immunotherapy for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) – known as BNT116 – utilises a messenger RNA (mRNA) to present common tumour markers from NSCLC to the patient’s immune system, with the aim of helping the immune system recognise and fight cancer cells expressing these markers.

The investigational vaccine is designed to specifically enhance immune responses against targets primarily expressed by cancer cells, reducing the risk of toxicity to healthy, non-cancerous cells – unlike chemotherapy, which often affects both cancerous and healthy cells.

This is bigger than huge. For one thing, it’s already been deployed. And, once you understand what it’s doing and how it works, it’s pretty much of a layup that it will succeed.

So, what they are doing is using the same trick, to make cells produce a few markers from the several various mutations that cause common lung cancers. If I recall Orac’s explanation from Aeons ago, lung cancers are interesting because they like to have 2 mutations in a row – the first disables pre-programmed cell death (uh oh!) and the second jams it into reproductive overdrive (Houston: we have a problem). One clever bit about this whole thing is that it’s never normal to have either of those two mutations, so why not teach the patient’s body to whack them on sight? And that’s that.

Janusz Racz, 67, from London, is the first participant in the trial. He said: “… Dr Sarah (Benafif) explained how the vaccine should work and how it was different to the treatment I had recently completed. The hope was that it would stop the cancer coming back.

“I thought it over, and … decided to take part because I hope it will provide a defence against cancer cells. But I also thought that my participation in this research could help other people in future and help this therapy become more widely available.

“As a scientist myself, I know that science can only advance if people agree to participate in programmes like this. I work in artificial intelligence, and I am open to trying new things. My family did research about the trial too, and they supported me taking part.”

As a non-imbecile, Racz immediately understood the value of the therapy and thought “why not?” This is not the first human anti-cancer vaccine, either, I’m going to count the HPV vaccine as one, and possibly SHINGRIX as a vaccine against dementia. Where is the end-game? The end-game is that humans may not have a technological civilization for enough longer that it matters, although if we are able to dodge our self-triggered doom, it could become a personalized cancer cure. That’s a bit trickier – there was a brilliant study years ago in which a large tumor was removed, sectioned into grids, and each grid sequenced. That revealed something that was a surprise at the time (but is now expected) namely that the tumor was not all copies of a single cell: once the reproduction lock had come off and it went into overdrive, there were entire family trees of specific mutations, some of which were benign immortal cells others of which were rapidly proliferating heaps of mutations. In order to do some kind of targeted mRNA vaccine, I think that scientists would have to do a bucket-load or two (hey put those data centers to good use!) of analysis trying to find root common ancestry that could be targeted for immune response. I am skating the edge of my knowledge, here, so I should just shut up and be happy.

It’s tempting to ask an AI to produce me a disgusting tree of icky but realistic mutated cells, with RFK Jr down on one of the branches, but the generalized anti-AI attitude around here bugs me. …ah, heck with you guys. Just don’t tell me any of the tumors have too many fingers. Note: I did not tell it to add Farage, Biden, etc. Just RFK.