Of course it needs to be controlled and regulated. Like any other drugs. One of the reasons drugs are expensive is because there is so many regulatory hurdles that drug makes have to deal with before they can touch a patient.

I get your hypothetical, but it has two shortcomings. Firstly, training the immune system against cancer mutations is fairly easy, because the mutations are not present during the process of T and B cell maturation, so in the population of circulating naive T and B cells in a patient, there are likely to exist ones that are going to recognise the cancer antigen. Whatever proteins drive the dark pigmentation of skin or green eye colour will be used to drive the negative selection of T and B cells in the person with dark skin or brown eyes. And so, even if you administer a “vaccine” encoding these proteins, their immune systems will not be able to mount a response against them.

Secondly, what about the practicalities. Say you made the anti-green eye vaccine - how do you administer it to people? I’m assuming we’re not talking about some dystopian future where forcing people to receive injections that contain biologicals killing them is legal. It’s not the kind of “vaccine” that you could just spread in the air or add to drinking water for it to take effect.

I think the first point to make is that this is not really the patient’s own genetic information, but that of their cancer, something they desperately want to get rid of. And the second point is that to my knowledge, there is no county on earth, where taking part in a clinical trial would not require the patient’s consent, which is to say, all people in the study were informed that the genetic sequences of their cancers will be analysed and used to generate a vaccine.

As for the potential to become a weapon, you would have to elaborate, because I really don’t see how the Moderna vaccine strategy could be weaponised.

In general, mutations can happen anywhere on any gene, so every patient’s cancer will have its unique signature of mutations. However, like in the evolution of organisms by natural selection, most random mutations will have a detrimental effect and the cells carrying it will die. Some of the mutations will be neutral and despite the change in the amino acid, the cells harbouring it won’t survive better or worse than cells that don’t have it. But a few mutations will make the cancer cells proliferate faster or evade the immune system better, which will lead to these cells surviving and ultimately overtaking the population of the cancer cells. The latter mutations often happen in the same places on the same genes, and in melanoma for example, in as many as 41% of cases the 600th amino acid in a protein called BRAF mutates from valine to alanine (so the code for that mutation is “BRAF V600E”), and BRAF is only one example of such genes that commonly mutate in the same position.

So to answer your question - I don’t know Moderna’s exact protocol, but my guess is that the tailored vaccine will contain a mixture of these commonly occurring mutations and some mutations that are unique to the patient.

Thank you for the kind reaction.

I recently moved from Reddit to Lemmy (same username) and I took my comments with me.

The target antigens are from human cells, but they are human cells that mutated and hence became cancerous. What Moderna does, is it takes DNA from these cells, sequences it and finds where exactly the mutations occurred. A mutation means that there is a different sequence of amino acids in a protein, which in effect makes it a new and distinct antigen. This way, they select antigens that are present in the melanoma cells, but not in normal cells of the body. Then they take these mutated sites and use them to generate mRNA that will encode them all, be used to synthesise these mutated antigens, and train the immune system to react to them as alien antigens. The treatment described in this article is a combination of the mRNA vaccine with Keytruda, which is a cancer therapy based on an antibody. The antibody targets a protein from the PD-1 / PD-L1 axis. This axis is used by normal cells to tell the immune system not to attack those cells, because they are body’s own cells. Cancer cells often mutate like crazy, but then exploit this PD-1 / PD-L1 axis basically to say to the immune system “nothing to see here”.

As for Rabies, I think we already have pretty well working vaccines, so we’re not really in a dire need for new ones.

As for prions, it would be tricky. The reason prions do what they do is not that they are mutated proteins, but misfolded proteins. This is to say they assume the wrong shape, even though the sequence of amino acids in them is the same as in the healthy version of the protein. And this in turn means that they were synthesised based on a healthy, unmutated version of mRNA. And this in turn means that there is no mutation that the Moderna vaccine strategy could employ to train the immune system to recognise that prion protein.

I wouldn’t phrase it in black and white terms (permissible - not permissible), but to answer a question similar to yours - yes, I think it’s normal for people to feel stronger repulsion on the thought of eating animals with which we can form stronger bonds. So I, for example, cringe more at the thought of eating a dog, than eating a cat, than eating a cow, than eating a fish, etc…

I agree that there is something special about every animal, but you seem to be talking about generic specialness, about intelligence and capacity for suffering, but you haven’t really addressed my points, i.e. there are actual biological hallmarks of humans and dogs having forged a stronger mental and emotional connection in the course of evolution than humans and any other animals that we eat.

Edit: clarity

Well, I kinda agree with you, but I also kinda don’t. On one hand, animals are animals, so one should either object to eating all or not object to eating any. And if one is going to make any distinctions, they should be for sentience, the ability to be miserable on a farm, and the ability to feel pain. But that means that even though you found yourself a moral foundation for objecting to dog eating while being ok with fish eating (and possibly bird eating), it’s still hypocritical to object to dog eating, but not cow or pig eating (or kangaroo eating in the Oz).

On the other hand, there are things that do make dogs special. We started domesticating them about twice as long ago as we did pigs and cows. We were domesticating them for companionship, not meat, so the selection pressure favoured different traits in the domesticated wolves than it did in the domesticated auroch or boar. Which, for example, includes a special muscle that evolved in canis familiaris above its eyes to give it the ability of giving you that look that we humans can’t help but interpret as cute. Also, if I recall correctly, human and their pet dog gazing into each others eyes is the only documented instance of cross-spegific interaction that leads to the secretion of oxytocin in the brains of both gazers involved.

All of this to say that, actually, I’m leaning towards the notion that there is something special about dogs, that cows and pigs don’t have.

I don’t watch TV, so I actually use YouTube for a lot of entertainment and education. Veritasium, CGP Grey, Ramblomatic, How to cook that, Kurzgesagt, Numberphile, Agadmator… And more.

Haha two exact opposite answers. From what I remember, the advertiser can chose the payment model. They can either say “I will pay YouTube a tiny amount for every time the ad is shown” or “I will pay YouTube a less tiny amount for every time the ad is clicked”. But it was a few years ago that I read about it so it might have changed since then.

What alternatives are there?

I get the point of your gun analogy, but I don’t think it’s an apt one. It’s not like only people sensitive to gunshot wounds die from gunshot wounds. If you shoot a person with a gun the damage is pretty certain. If cankers were as certain to be caused by SLS then everyone using SLS-containing toothpaste would have cankers. We don’t. The bottom line is that the article linked to by OP is making misleading claims.

But I despite me not agreeing that the gunshot wound analogy is apt here, I get what you mean, so maybe the title of the lemmy post would be better phrased as something like “YSK that SLS […] can be the cause of cankers in sensitive people”. Which is also kinda the point I was trying to make in the last paragraph of my original reply.

Edit: formatting

I think the article is misleading. The studies don’t seem to show that SLS causes canker sores, but if you do suffer from them, it will exacerbate them or delay their healing. The article says “studies”, while only citing one study, that actually recruited patients who already suffered from the sores. A double blinded cross-over trial concluded that “The number of ulcers and episodes did not differ significantly between SLS-A, SLS-B, and SLS-free. Only duration of ulcers and mean pain score was significantly decreased during the period using SLS-free. Although SLS-free did not reduce the number of ulcers and episodes, it affected the ulcer-healing process and reduces pain in daily lives in patients with [canker sores].” Although I don’t have access to the full version, so I can’t view the details. By the way, SLS-A was an SLS-free toothpaste spiked with 1.5% SLS, and SLS-B was a commercially available toothpaste with 1.5% SLS in it already.

You can tell that the article is trying to sensationalise something by such phrases as:

• “But there’s no reason to accept a hazardous chemical in your toothpaste.” You know what else is in your toothpaste? Sodium fluoride. Which is lethal at high enough dose. It’s all about the concentration.

• “It’s strong stuff — the cleaning solution I use on our garage floor is 50% SLS.” Well, yes, if you use it at concentrations ridiculously above the ones found in a toothpaste, of course it’s going to be “strong stuff”. You know what else is strong stuff? 100% acetic acid. Yet somehow, at 10% we happily consume it as vinegar. By the way, vinegar - great cleaning agent!

Don’t get me wrong, if you’re sensitive to SLS, by all means avoid it. But I’m not a fan of articles that make blanket statements about a chemical that is mostly harmful in the concentration that it’s used in hygiene products. It’s another one of those “aspartame gives you cancer” (which it doesn’t by the way).

What’s the TLDW for this video?

Love your username btw. You should really join the Thread where you post AI generated images using only your username as the prompt 😄

The new word for “whitelisted” is “allowlisted”?

Luckily I work for a great company where the culture is generally “we don’t care when you do your work as long as you do it”, so I don’t have many larks around me with that flawed mindset anymore. But I do emphasize it when I get the chance!

I’m a morning lark, but this annoys me so much! People should be able to work whenever the F they’re at their most productive, not when morning larks decided everyone should be.

Lying. They reposted from a Reddit post that shows an eight dollar Starbucks sandwich.

They should also make people watch add bofore they are handed their Amazon Prime order. Unless they pay for the higher tier subscription.

Anyway, good to know that Amazon is finally doing something to fix its fledgling revenue from Prime.