> RNA is fragile. So, like in the COVID mRNA vaccines, these instructions can be delivered in a protective fatty bubble called a “lipid nanoparticle.” Think of it like a balloon made of fatty acids, with the instructions nestled inside. Once injected, these lipid nanoparticles take the mRNA instructions into cells, where the fatty bubble degrades, mRNA instructions are released, and the cell’s machinery start to produce whatever protein the mRNA tells it to.
I still don't understand how writers about mRNA vaccines gloss over the numerous details that should be important. The picture that she paints lacks a targeting mechanism. Which cells will these lipid nanoparticles enter? She does not say. How much protein from the mRNA will those cells produce? It can't be predictable, right? Will there be significant differences in the dose of the final product between individuals? Is this important? She does not say. Will the cells that engulf those lipid nanoparticles be destined to die, in case the protein they produce is a foreign one, like the spike protein of Covid? They must be, right? After all, that's how immunity works. Is this important, given that there is no targeting mechanism? She does not say. And so on...
What makes an mRNA vaccine more appealing than a protein-based one?
> What makes an mRNA vaccine more appealing than a protein-based one?
Having worked on the same targeting mechanisms for protein based vaccines meant to be personalized cancer therapies, and having followed the mRNA vaccines with envy, the benefits are absolutely massive. But there's not a single alternative. In comparison to each type:
Short peptides injection are worse because: minimal immune stimulation, less of a mechanism to train the immune system on the peptide targets, have not been effective.
Viral delivery of mRNA, that makes proteins, or more exotic methods like yeast with modified genomes: this is a traditional vaccine with a custom viral genome with the peptides of interest added as part of the viral genome. This is not directly a protein virus, but it does make the cells it infects produce the peptides. This requires cell culture to grow the virus, which requires a unique clean room per vaccine, which can be impractical and expensive for a custom virus. It's also very very slow to produce, QC, and make sure it's safe. mRNA production is faster, cleaner, safer, just all around better in every possible way.
As for your other questions, sure they are interesting, but get ready to gear up and read tooooons of literature. Most people don't have any of these questions unless they have a deep distrust of the technology, and don't trust that others have bothered to investigate.
Skepticism is good, and if you are truly curious I really applaud you and encourage you to pick up an immunology text book so that you can also read and understand the papers. But mRNA vaccine skepticism has to be the stupidest "skepticism" and falsehoods I have ever seen of a new technology. As the competitor to what I was working on, I must concede that it's better on all metrics, and I am kind of saddened for humanity that all these lies about mRNA seem to dominate over the true and huge technological advancement that has occurred.
>>> But mRNA vaccine skepticism has to be the stupidest "skepticism" and falsehoods I have ever seen of a new technology.
To be fair the media and government are more to blame. By attacking and trying to silence the skeptics during COVID only proved to make what you said worse.
You wont make a very attractive product by shaming, deriding, or forcing someone into taking said product that deals with their health.
I don't see how you can convince a skeptic who doesn't have the same knowledge as say a educated professional working on vaccines.
Either the skeptic needs the same level of education or an explanation from someone they trust with the level of education needed. You can't convince the skeptics with a sound byte. If they truly believe the government has it out for the entire country. I don't know where you would even begin.
I think the flaw here is you don't form your success or failure of adoption based on if you can convince the skeptics.
Thinking everyone can be brought to your side with reason is not a logical assumption. Some people no matter how strong an argument will not want to do something no matter the level of evidence or reasoning. Be it their faith or stubbornness and we need to be ok with that.
jailing them, excluding them from society, or forcing them from their jobs to provide to their famalies is how you get people to side with skeptics and does the opposite effect
> Short peptides injection are worse because: minimal immune stimulation, less of a mechanism to train the immune system on the peptide targets, have not been effective.
If the problem of peptide vaccines is weak immune stimulation, then wouldn't the problem of mRNA vaccines be autoimmunity?
No, why would that be? Auto-immunity comes from immune cells targeting healthy cells, and the mRNA peptide translations do not correspond to healthy cells.
Don't feel sad. There are many people in your situation, who wonder why there is so much backlash to their ideas even though you have done due diligence and are working in good faith and genuinely think that your approach/idea/invention is a boon to humanity.
Everything you said sounds interesting, but my experience, as a scientist in a different field, is that media focused for regular non-expert people simply isn't going to capture those kinds of things. You need to find recent papers, review articles or maybe textbooks to get that kind of information, basically its going to be in documents targeted at experts in this field not lay people.
You are correct, and the problem with these articles is that they sound too much like a sales pitch and less like a responsible general-public divulgation article.
She may not go in detail about the items aforementioned, but she doesn't even mention once that the technology might have have possible dangers, and that one must exercise caution in its evaluation. The article its all about the potential benefits of the technology, without warning the public about its potential dangers.
She even mentions that "the FDA is so painfully slow, and so indifferent to human suffering. It takes, on average, eight years to get a new drug through clinical trials."
Yeah, those pesky thorough clinical trials, they are a hurdle on the return on investment.
Similarly, my question is if we trick random cells around the body into producing these spike proteins, and they presumably don't stop for a while (no idea on how long), does this not also create an undo burdon on the immune system until the cells artificially producing the protein die? And if there's loose RNA floating around, after these cells die can another cell _also_ start reproducing the protein?
I think the idea is that the RNA doesn't last long. It's quite fragile. You might get fragments of it though, but not enough to print out the whole protein.
Don't forget reverse transcription into free-floating DNA. That's much more stable and can last a long time, and it was confirmed in a lab back in 2021 or 2022 that our liver cells are capable of doing it with the Pfizer mRNA covid vaccine.
There was another study last year on long covid that found some vaccine-specific spike proteins persisting weeks or months after they should have degraded/been removed by the immune system, but IIRC they didn't find a reason why.
Maybe? Although viruses that we are naturally exposed to on a daily basis don't routinely bypass the mucous membrane barrier, and do not roam freely throughout our bodies. And they normally do have a targeting mechanism that allows them to selectively infect certain types of cells. And in any case, viruses are supposed to be bad for the organism; so I am not sure how this consideration helps.
I mean viruses target everything and nothing, and mutate insanely rapidly. I imagine the majority that enter our bodies aren’t able to perform any function, and then the ones that can will opportunistically infect anything without regard for the consequences.
As for whether or not viruses are bad for us, I mean I don’t think we have any choice in the matter anyway, they’re even more numerous than bacteria, and absolutely everywhere.
I wonder how many viruses infect our cells every day vs how many “lipid viruses” are in a standard Moderna Covid shot.
The mRNA vaccine mostly stays near the site of injection: your arm. This is why your arm mostly aches, and the rest of your body not so much. A bunch of cells there will die, because your immune system much prefers an innocent cell dead than a infected cell continuing to multiply. But you have plenty of cells. Really quite a lot. So it is entirely worth it.
We can try to optimize how much protein cells will make from the mRNA. The goal is "as much as possible, for as long as possible", but mRNA is not meant to be long lived. And foreign mRNA trying to make its way into cells would be destroyed very quickly without trickery (like the nanoparticle and the pseudouridine).
But either way, medicine works just the same (a surprising amount of the time!) in the cases where the precise details and mechanisms haven't been elucidated yet. If it works empirically, the details are just details.
It seems like our hot pace of trendy advances has let non-fiction writers flirt with writing in the science fiction genre. If you see some articles as hard science fiction with a "this is a true story" framing device then they make more sense.
What makes it more appealing is that you can change the mRNA sequence and change the proteins that are created, meaning you can make arbitrary proteins. Traditional vaccines are far less flexible like that since the process to create proteins has more steps
I still don't understand how writers about mRNA vaccines gloss over the numerous details that should be important. The picture that she paints lacks a targeting mechanism. Which cells will these lipid nanoparticles enter? She does not say. How much protein from the mRNA will those cells produce? It can't be predictable, right? Will there be significant differences in the dose of the final product between individuals? Is this important? She does not say. Will the cells that engulf those lipid nanoparticles be destined to die, in case the protein they produce is a foreign one, like the spike protein of Covid? They must be, right? After all, that's how immunity works. Is this important, given that there is no targeting mechanism? She does not say. And so on...
What makes an mRNA vaccine more appealing than a protein-based one?