- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- science@lemmy.ml
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The vaccine works by instructing the body to make up to 34 “neoantigens.” These are proteins found only on the cancer cells, and Moderna personalizes the vaccine for each recipient so that it carries instructions for the neoantigens on their cancer cells.
That’s pretty dope
You mispelled “expensive.”
He must be one of those non-Americans with universal healthc*re
Ew, I can feel myself getting healthier just parsing the word “u******l a***r”. You need to censor more of that.
I doubt that this vaccine will be covered by European health insurance providers if it costs a lot.
But… But everyone having a right to medical care whether they’re rich or poor? Unthinkable! Think of the shareholders!
I wonder if, even at this early stage of the therapy’s development, this would actually be more affordable than the alternative.
Melanoma patients are highly likely to have the cancer come back and or metastasize. Repeat treatments and hospitalizations are not cheap.
It’ll be reasonably expensive, but sequencing and gene alteration is way cheaper than in needs to be.
If this can actually cure cancers, it may even be worth it.
The thing is, surely there’s antibody against cancer antigens anyway, in ordinary cancer. A cancer cell expresses epitopes not on healthy cells.
Why is this better?
but sequencing and gene alteration is way cheaper than in[sic] needs to be.
…what? this sounds like you’re advocating for price increases.
Oops, new to Lemmy. But not new to typing, so no excuse.
I meant than “it used to be”.
I blame autocorrect.
I think “reasonable” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Whatever price they charge it will be to maximize to Moderna’s profits - i.e. they’ll price it slightly lower than what insurers / national health systems would be stung for what 44% of melanoma patients needing a second round of expensive chemo would cost them but not so high that no one will cover the treatment. So I guess the price is “reasonable”, in that it’ll be cheaper than the alternative but it’s not like Moderna will be charitable or fair about it.
It’s still an amazing breakthrough though.
Yeah you see this with a lot of monoclonal antibody treatments that private companies develop. They price them insanely high to recoup the insane research costs, a lot of them have reimbursement programs for patents who couldn’t afford to take the drug, or who’s insurance can’t cover all of the drug, because they want a patient base as it adds value for their product. What happens in sane countries is you have healthcare boards negotiating prices with drug manufacturers to bring the cost down, and insurance or public plans covering what the most long-term cost effective and beneficial treatments are. Drug companies want to recoup their costs sunk in to research, and they want a patient base that can affirm the validity of the product.
Where I have a major problem is when private companies benefit from publicly funded research, or for private drug manufacturers who are merely producing single-molecule or bio-similar compounds for generic labels. IMO generic drug production should be publicly owned, as should products developed using public research grants. I would also do away with private insurance and tax schemes and use market simulation models to determine costs and efficiencies within a publicly owned framework. Small private specialty clinics I would maintain as well as research grants to private research but bringing the drug to market would be socialized and the private research institution reimbursed through that. Any essential, standardized treatments, would effectively be delivered in a fully socialized way, with smaller specialty areas being more economically “free” but in service to the broader socialized model.
It’s not better, ideally the body finds and eliminates cancer cells all by itself. Just like it does with viruses or infection. It happens all the time, most of the time you’d never know it happened
What this does is hardcore the “solution” into your immune cells. It tells them exactly what antibody to build, and spams that knowledge, so your immune cells are loaded up and ready to use that antibody
Yeah like we have cancerous cells in our bodies all the time, it’s when our immune system isn’t dealing with them that it becomes a growth or tumor.
Exactly. And ideally not just cells growing out of control, cancerous or not. Senescent cells that no longer perform their function too - they all have bio markers that are missed.
If we could buff up elimination of cells no longer fulfilling their function, and introduce various revitalized stem cells? That’s how you live to 200 baby. That’s rejuvenation- it doesn’t fix plaque in your arteries or structural defects, but I’m convinced it would buy you a lot of time, alongside treating the symptoms
And that gives you plenty of time for us to figure out the biomorphic field and gets you to eternal youth and body mods… That vein of science works on simple life, but mammals are complicated. It didn’t take much to figure out amphibian xenobots, but we’ll probably reach AI superintelligence before we figure out how to flesh sculpt with human tissue… We’re a lot more delicate
I get this sounds insane to most people, but there’s legit science behind my beliefs, and I can look up specific evidence on request… Just be specific with what you want further reading on, it’s a complex topic
You pay tax. Tax is for roads, schools, and hospitals. Why don’t you get healed when you’re sick? Because you’re a sucker, bro.
Also sounds very hard to do a proper controlled trial on. Every treatment produces a different protein, so there’s no consistent factor to test except for the delivery mechanism.
There’s still ways but not trivial. You have to do multifactor analysis, but it’s gonna have a ton of noise unless you have a large sample of different people with recurring “neoantigens”. It’s similar to how drug side effects are tracked for people who take multiple medicines, you compare against populations which share different combinations of the same factors.
Multifactor analysis still requires an underlying commonality. People taking multiple drugs are all still taking the drug being trialed. You’re removing the confounding factors. If every treatment is a unique cancer protein there is no common factor. The treatment is the confounding factor.
To put it another way. A safety trial has to prove that any protein administered is safe.
Edit: just realised you’re probably talking about efficacy trials, whereas I’m more concerned with safety.
Personalized medicine is a way to rob you blind. Drugs cost unreal money. So does the hospital administration.
Time for the antivax doomsday cult to extol the virtues of cancer.
god wants the children to have incurable tumors
I mean don’t people already spout this crap?
Mhmm, sins of the parents pass down and all that. That’s sky daddy justice right thurr.
No one ever said “God wants me to have incurable tumors.” It’s always someone else who should suffer. This is the opposite of the early Christian message. I would almost say, if you are not helping people to the point of discomfort, you are missing the point of Christianity.
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
You should inject bleach using a flash light.
Any horse cancer drugs out there I can take?
In my day Laetrile was the quack conservative medicine for cancer.
it’s naaatural
Guys, just look at the economy! Infinite, uninhibited growth is a GOOD THING!!!
“We think that in some countries the product could be launched under accelerated approval by 2025.”
Thats literally next year. That’s amazing.
Can’t wait to see what other uses we can find for mRNA
Cure for auto immune diseases is incoming FWIW
I wish. My kids are coeliac i.e., the presence of gluten in food causes the body to attack its own gut.
I’d love if there were a vaccine that they could take once, or even every several months that would let them eat what they wanted. It would have to be something that either turns off the errant immune response altogether or teaches the body to tolerate / ignore gluten proteins.
It’s coming! I’m confident in my lifetime they’ll have it solved. They’re actually working on an “anti-vaccine” that corrects celiac/diabetes. I’m also interested because I have 1 celiac and 1 diabetes. Celiac sucks.
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Atkins is dead.
Does anyone know yet if long COVID is an auto-immune disease? I only assume it is but otherwise don’t know.
It seems like a mix. Part from organ damage, part from misbehaving immune response in some people
I just found a paper in trying to figure this out, but it seems like the author of this study wasn’t really looking at it as an autoimmune disease, but a post-viral syndrome like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (ME/CFS) which is partially immunological, but not autoimmune. ME/CFS has been known about a lot longer than long COVID, and seems to be better (if not yet well) understood.
Reading though a lot of the sites with information on ME/CFS, it makes intuitive sense that long COVID has more in common with it than something like rheumatoid arthritis. I hope that long COVID brings attention to ME/CFS, or in studying similar diseases we’re able to learn more about their common causes/treatments, or generally understand both better.
COVID is a virus, so not an autoimmune illness. Long COVID might be partly autoimmune
All I heard overpandemic was that COVID was triggering diabetes in people which makes sense because we don’t know what triggers diabetes but one of the theories is it’s caused by viral stress.
I bet any money they will one day find a genetic mutation like the one in BRCA2 that causes cancer.
Fuck cancer, this sounds great!
Fuck cancer!
Fuck cancer! And fuck Spez!
Speaking of cancer…
I hope cancer gets cancer!
Fuck cancer
You know what this sounds like to me?
Like Moderna is gonna ask $10k a poke.
Edit: ITT: Pharma bros telling me how awesome artificially-inflated medication prices are.
Sure would be nice if capitalism didn’t exist 🤪
Then the vaccine wouldn’t either.
It wouldn’t exist at all if capitalism didn’t exist.
People would just get cancer and die like they used to.
Capitalism is the reason we (and you) have nice things.
Yes, no innovation has been done under any system but capitalism. /s Let’s forget about how totalitarian Russia was the first to space. Let’s forget about how much medicine was developed under the religious authoritarianism of ancient Arabia. Let’s forget about how much philosophy was conceived under feudalism.
Let’s totally forget that The Six Nations managed to maintain a cooperative collective of hundreds of thousands of people for at least 15,000-25,000 years with their environmental impact being quite literally the creation and tending of “The Garden of Eden.”
What six nations?
arabic numbers bad.
or is it because edison couldnt claim this to be an american invention aswell? just because america is full of thieves doesnt mean they invented shit.
rockets…werner von braun
lightbulb…lumiere
computer …conrad zuse
internet…tim
i am sure americans have invented absolutely nothing and stolen absolutely everything.
biontech is german, pfizer are the murican scumbags.
tiktok&wechat… chinese
are you still on meta or drugs?
Capitalism is the reason third generation morons have multiple private jets.
Capitalism =/= money.
I’m sure leaving reddit was a good idea, but joining lemmy might not have been. People here are just delusional in their approach to reality.
It seems a lot of people came here because they’re too reddit for reddit.
Did you really think these new vaccine will be affordable? Those nice things are for the rich.
Recently read the Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson, and in those books an anti aging “vaccine” is made and shared freely for the citizens of Mars, but on Earth where the rich and powerful still control everything, its used as an incentive to come and work for the most powerful companies, or if you have the money then you can buy it.
I literally hope such a thing is never invented, imagine if the Musk’s, Trump’s, Bezos’, and Putin’s of the world lived for hundreds of years instead of finally fucking dying at 90-100 at most.
Terrifying.
That might actually be enough inequality that we might do something about it.
Look up Ted Faro’s story from Horizon Zero Dawn.
It wouldn’t exist at all if capitalism didn’t exist.
Science doesn’t need capitalism to exist. Technology doesn’t need to be for-profit to be developed.
In this case, you have to develop an individual vaccine for every patient based on the DNA from their own cancer. That’s actually a lot of work. $10K a poke is very reasonable given that you could easily spend 10 or 100 times that on conventional treatment.
Okay but forcing someone to pay you $550k (averaging your values) to not die maybe is still incredibly fucking awful, so it’s really not hard to be better than that.
I can respect that developing a personalized vaccine might take a lot of work but I’m not a chemist. I don’t know how much work it actually takes, nor do I know how many vaccines a person would realistically need to cure their cancer be it stage 1 up to stage 4?
What I do know is that if this vaccine ends up being more effective than the traditional method then it is a wonderful discovery, but if it leads to life-long medical debt and subsequent financial ruin all the same your life is still fucked… I guess I’d rather be poor and alive, but I’d also rather not be destitute.
I know it sounds awful, but I’ve had family members die of cancer in the US and Europe, and 10k for a cure wouid have been a bargain in either case.
And hopefully with time the price will come down.
If this truly works, it’ll be one of those things that cheaper for society to pay for than letting the disease drag on and fighting it with our old methods.
The $10k isn’t really the point. That’s just a number thrown out as an example of what we expect a company to do. The real issue is power. Worst case it’ll be either you go into essentially permanant debt by attempting the treatment, try traditional treatments with wildly varying success rates, or probably just die. Money isn’t even a question really, it’s using cancer and the treatment of it as a way to profit at levels far beyond reasonable.
A business should make money. Has to stay open somehow. Make surviving achievable for a good life and still make millions. We were almost universally in shock when that Bowser fellow has his wages garnished by 30% for the rest of his life. Apart from the legal aspect as a reason, how would this be any different?
This is the world we live in. It shouldn’t be though. I lost my Mom to cancer and she’s one of those people who would have attempted traditional methods due to the overwhelming cost this one promises. I doubt she’s the only one.
Fortunately both Musk and Bezoa will be safe from cancer instead of all those thousands of Mozarts they told us about
Damn you weren’t kidding about the Pharma Bros. The fuckin Tankies are glad to not be the dumbasses in thread for once
When it’s inevitably going to be a lot less than that, will you eat your words?
If it cost ten thousand dollars I’d throw an enormous party. That’s already a very small price for a cancer treatment.
Right? Bunch of morons who never had cancer, or never knew anyone who was diagnosed and treated for cancer, thinking a 10k treatment is expensive.
Communism Stan’s be Stanning
10k is expensive
Less expensive than now? Yes
Still expensive
That’s zero sum thinking.
If it was 10k that is, literally, an order of magnitude cheaper.
You can’t have it both ways. The people who I know who have had cancer, and had it treated, the cost has been well over 100k. Some over 200k. That’s per time. If it came back it would cost that all over again.
So which is it. Is it evil that a new treatment could cost 90% less? Or should the capitalists do what they do and charge 300k for this better treatment?
As soon as you stop eating that pharma boot, homie.
The article suggests the vaccine prevents the recurrence of a specific cancer by 44% vs conventional treatment alone. So let’s be pessimists and say it only prevents recurrence by 22%. Should we eat our words that still 1/5th of people who’d otherwise die or suffer horribly from a recurring cancer now don’t?
I think I would be more skeptical of the eventual price of this treatment and less about its effectiveness.
Oh, what villains! Developing a cure for cancer and asking for ten thousand dollars for it!
In terms of cancer treatment, do you have any idea how small ten thousand dollars is?
america is just sad
Do drugs other than betel nuts grow on trees in your country?
Dying from cancer is also sad. Chemo is also sad. Who wins? Find out tonight at 8pm
LOL I just remembered that some folks in the anti-covid-vax/maga category have been referring to the mRNA covid vaccines as ‘the cancer vaccines’ based on disinformation that they would ‘interact with your genes’ and ‘give you cancer in 2 years’
Seeing this headline [Moderna’s mRNA cancer vaccine works even better than thought] I had to look to see if it was the cancer-targeting vaccine or some mouth-breathers talking about the covid ones 😅
I’m going to preface this by saying I had the moderna series and all boosters. Also had COVID once, ironically the weekend before Id scheduled a booster. I entirely believe that the vaccine is effective at reducing infection rates and severity.
have been referring to the mRNA covid vaccines as ‘the cancer vaccines’
Ironic, because they literally started as “cancer vaccines”, literally a niche cancer treatment. When they were first approved in 2008.
based on disinformation that they would ‘interact with your genes’ and ‘give you cancer in 2 years’
We really don’t know the long term consequences of mRNA vaccines. The COVID vaccine is the first application of them at large scale, and the first application of them where we’d normally expect most recipients to still be alive and mostly healthy ten years down the road (again, because they were originally created as a cancer treatment).
Check in in 2030 and we’ll know whether or not we made a good bet on that one. We probably did, but there’s a reason the manufacturers were given immunity from liability for anything that comes of the COVID vaccines.
There is a common misconception that long term effects will manifest long after the injection. All vaccines with longterm effects manifested their effect shortly after the injection. It makes little sense that you will have adverse reactions months or years later because the compounds are long gone from your system.
There was also the misconception that the vaccine was rushed and that steps were skipped or shortened during testing. That is not the case. The administrative processes were prioritized and there was a huge amount of test candidates so testing could be done much quicker. The normal process is not longer because they want to gather more long term data but because it just takes longer to gather it.
There is a common misconception that long term effects will manifest long after the injection. All vaccines with longterm effects manifested their effect shortly after the injection. It makes little sense that you will have adverse reactions months or years later because the compounds are long gone from your system.
There are lots of things that do damage that isn’t necessarily obvious in the short term, especially if you don’t know exactly what that damage might look like. There’s a reason I said we probably made a good bet with mRNA vaccines for COVID, the odds that they’ve done some kind of damage that isn’t immediately apparent and we’ll see an uptick in some problem or another a few years down the line in vaccinated people is very low but not zero. If the risk of this vaccine damaging patients in some fashion that wasn’t apparent within the duration of trials was zero, rather than merely low there would be no reason to make the manufacturers immune to liability from damages caused as a consequence.
On the upside, we conveniently have a large population who have decided to be the control group for mRNA COVID vaccines out of political spite so we have a large sample to compare long term outcomes between.
We really don’t know the long term consequences of mRNA vaccines.
We know they are way safer than the old DNA vaccines because they don’t literally give you a small dose of the virus like the old vaccines.
cue antivaxxers’ pro-plague and pro-death screeching 🤦♂️
Any day now those vaxxed will drop dead!!
I often go by a place were somebody tagged the wall with something that roughly translates to “Half the vaccinated will die”.
So half will not? Ever?
The other half becomes vampires, obviously.
So, the 5G mind controller chips in it do make sense after all.
It’s an easy issue to resolve, really. Just install garlic frequency beams to our 5g towers and boom solved the vampire crisis
Everyone dies
Exactly.
Whomever did that tag didn’t think enough to notice they’re implying that the vaccine gives ethernal life to half those who take it.
(It also neatly illustrates how simplifying one’s idea down to a slogan actually increases the chance of ending up implying something else than the idea one wanted to pass)
Does that mean I won’t have to go to work anymore or will they find a way to indenture and monetize my corpse?
Capital zombies. I don’t think I’ve seen that movie done…
Well if we wait long enough, they will! See! We were right all along!
Haha, but if we do, they will follow in a gross and painful fashion: In Canada, 83% of the population received at least one dose. I believe we are
39M40M now (lol, I was sleeping).So 6,800,000 gonna keep the electricity going; grow and process food; and perform medical procedures? --Oh wait, all the medical people are dead. Speaking of dead, there aren’t any firemen to dispose of the bodies! Damn, biohazard everywhere. I’m assuming their edjumacashun didn’t be gud, so I’m not hopeful of their prospects for rebuilding, but I suspect rage will take them out before it gets to that point anyways.
Edit: Math is hard
Surelly at least the food problem and the bodies problem can be solved at the same time by resorting to cannibalism?!
With a bit of luck the vaxxed would drop dead in early Winter, which would help preserve the meat longer.
What’s the proportion of the overweight in Canada? I’m thinking maybe the energy problem too can be solved with a proper use of all that fat.
“It’s God’s will!”
I was browsing LinkedIn before Christmas and a person popped up in my feed who spent the entire pandemic over on Twitter posting misinformation. This POS dressed up the misinfo as if it were science & statistics even though it was obviously distorted and cherry picked nonsense. He had hundreds of thousands of followers so I think it is reasonable to assume people died as a result of his garbage.
In the UK there is a law called the Cancer Act which was enacted in the 30s to ban advertising or selling of quack cures for cancer and give some means to prosecute offenders. I really wish that act were modernised to ban advertisement or promotion of quackery for any disability, chronic / terminal condition or contagious disease.
I wonder if my mom will accept this vaccine for her cancer after years of believing all the conspiracy theories about the COVID vaccine. I’m willing to bet that if she has the opportunity, she’ll jump on it.
Out of curiosity, how do you think she’ll rationalize it?
I don’t think she will other than that it might save her life. She’ll live with the dissonance, which as an evangelical Christian is nothing new for her.
I never once thought about it before but how do they select a target antigen for what is effectively a human cell? Maybe they could take a similar approach to Rabies or Prion Disease.
BioNTech is doing something similar. Their approach (and likely also Moderna’s approach) works by first identifying mutations in protein coding genes in the cancer cells. Then, they target the resulting mutated protein (that is distinct from the same protein in non-cancer calls) with their vaccines.
Can’t wait for it to be specifically priced for only the 1% to be able to afford. Just like all the other cancer drugs that work.
It’s for rich folk. Not for us poors. Elysium.
Why be that cynical about it? All technology is only for the rich when it’s first introduced.
I don’t believe I’m being cynical, I think I’m being realistic.
Recall that the formula for insulin was given for free to the university of toronto and now most people in the USA cannot afford insulin even though the cost of creation has not changed since the 1950’s.
It was only extremely recently that 35 dollar insulin became available in the USA and that’s still obscenely overpriced.
Reference: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cost-of-insulin-by-country
I’m curious what cost figure they’re using here because the cost seems odd for Canada. I used to work at a pharmacy and insulin is fully covered by public drug plans (there absolutely needs to be a federally public drug plan), I’m thinking of plans like Trillium in Ontario where you pay a deductible based on yearly income. Employer private insurance to my knowledge would cover it to $0, but possibly not the dispensing fee, which is VERY close to the amount listed here. If they are talking just raw cost per vial with no coverage then that’s possibly accurate, it’s just very rare to actually see that at the register at a pharmacy.
In general I like comparing the US and Canada healthcare regimes because we are pretty much linked to their economy, however seeing where our healthcare over/under performs vs the US you can really link to the differences in the way healthcare is implemented. Broadly speaking we have comparable outcomes, with US and Canada having areas of specialty, however the cost spent by the US on healthcare per capita is insanely higher. People will pad this by claiming that money is because of healthcare research in the US which “the world benefits from at our cost” but the figures aren’t often added together in that way. It really is the delivery of healthcare in the US where there are insane costs compared to every other G20 country with detailed healthcare data.
The insane addition in the USA is due to so many middle men working to up the cost basis to increase their bottom line, essentially the insurance companies are running a racket.
Here is the associated research report that the link I provided used for their data aggregation and comparisons:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA700/RRA788-1/RAND_RRA788-1.pdf
These are the associated surveys:
https://www.t1international.com/access-survey16/
https://www.t1international.com/access-survey18/
https://www.t1international.com/access-survey/
Specifically for your question about cost basis it seems they tallied the total price for the insulin based on its chemical costs (for each type of insulin) and then cross referenced that with the price placed down on both prescription drugs and over the counter drugs listed in the IQVIA MIDAS database:
“In our analysis, we used prescription-drug market data from IQVIA’s MIDAS database.2 The data we examined cover the year 2018 and span 33 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, including the United States.3 We did not restrict our analysis to prescription drugs, as certain insulins are available over the counter in some countries (including the United States).” - RAND RRA788 PDF Page 2, Paragraph 2; Mulcahy, Schawm & Edenfield “Comparing insulin prices in the United States to Other Countries” 2020.
(IQVIA MIDAS: https://www.iqvia.com/solutions/commercialization/brand-strategy-and-management/market-measurement/midas)
Once they had a general understanding and baseline for what the products should cost they then indexed and compared prices globally using volume weighted pricing, they do note specifically that the manufacturer prices they used from MIDAS does not reflect rebates or discounts that would exist at point of sale (RAND RRA788 Pg 3 Para 2).
These are the references the research paper provided:
Cefalu, William T., Daniel E. Dawes, Gina Gavlak, Dana Goldman, William H. Herman, Karen Van Nuys, Alvin C. Powers, Simeon I. Taylor, and Alan L. Yatvin, on behalf of the Insulin Access and Affordability Working Group, “Insulin Access and Affordability Working Group: Conclusions and Recommendations,” Diabetes Care, Vol. 41, No. 8, August 2018, pp. 1299–1311.
Fuglesten Biniek, Jean, and William Johnson, “Spending on Individuals with Type 1 Diabetes and the Role of Rapidly Increasing Insulin Prices,” Health Care Cost Institute, January 21, 2019. As of September 1, 2020: https://healthcostinstitute.org/diabetes-and-insulin/spending-on-individuals-with-type-1- diabetes-and-the-role-of-rapidly-increasing-insulin-prices
IQVIA, “MIDAS,” webpage, undated. As of September 1, 2020: https://www.iqvia.com/solutions/commercialization/brand-strategy-and-management/market- measurement/midas
IQVIA Institute for Human Data Science, Medicine Use and Spending in the U.S.: A Review of 2018 and Outlook to 2023, Durham, N.C., May 9, 2019.
Roehrig, Charles, The Impact of Prescription Drug Rebates on Health Plans and Consumers, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Altarum Institute, April 2018.
Tribble, Sarah Jane, “You Can Buy Insulin Without a Prescription, but Should You?” Kaiser Health News, December 14, 2015. As of August 20, 2020: https://khn.org/news/you-can-buy-insulin-without-a-prescription-but-should-you/
what’s really cool is this plus telomerase will give us a youth serum
what’s really cool is this plus telomerase will give the extremely wealthy a youth serum
FTFY
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Full of cold I sniggered way too hard at that and 3 years of shnots came out. Cheers for the laugh and clear out. Happy new year
Godammit lemmy. Can’t we even enjoy a fucking cancer cure for a few minutes before the communist ranting begins?
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Apparently not
Fuck Cancer!
Nope. I’m constantly on the edge of quitting lemmy because of this shit.
It is kind of an annoyance. I don’t even think communists are all the way wrong tbh. I think there must be a middle path between what we’ve seen historically in communist countries and the slavish capitalism of the United States.
Thing is that isn’t the sole and single thought in my mind.
Like, I can see a scientific breakthrough for instance and be amazed and grateful.
Every medical treatment is expensive at first.
Here’s the thing: we’re not getting many people to the natural limits of the human body’s age much less working out ways to go past that.
Jeanne Louise Calment was 122 when she died. There’s a hypothesis that she switched identities with her mother at some point, but most scientists who study aging don’t consider it credible. Many other supercentenarian claims don’t hold up; they often come from places that had bad record keeping a century ago, and they just forget how many birthdays they’ve had. 115 seems the typical limit for most people, but even that might have very few legit claims.
There are so few people who make it that far that they’re basically rounding error even when including incorrect claims. Monaco has the highest average life expectancy at 87. We should be able to add almost 30 more years to that before we even talk about extraordinary youth serums.
Better cancer treatments will be part of getting us there, but far from the only factor.
telomeres are cells’ biological clock… they get shorter with each division, and is the general cause of your body breaking down, round the 80’s.
telomerase and other chemicals can reset those telomeres, but also cause the body’s existing precancerous cells to go malignant. (telomeres also limit cancer cell growth, and creating telomerase is one of the mutations required for full on cancer)
so, if we can regrow cells telomeres without causing cancer… we have a youth serum.
but there’s already other telomerase gene therapy in development anyways…and is the general cause of your body breaking down
This is the step where a heavy [citation needed] comes along. There are a lot of complex processes involved in aging, we have no idea if simply “make the telomeres longer!” is going to solve all of that. Frankly it seems unlikely that that’s all there is to it.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m an optimist when it comes to longevity research. I think aging is a problem that will eventually be solved. But there’s not going to be just one “cure for aging”, there’s a lot of things that go wrong over time and we’re probably going to have to find ways to fix each of them as they come along.
Right. You would have to look at alzheimers, osteoporosis, arthritis, liver failure, heart failure, gut microbe health, and a million other things that can go wrong in old age. It’s a tall claim to say “all this can be solved by telemerase”. In fact, having one thing claiming to solve a million different issues is a big red flag for quack medicine.
A good rule of thumb in medicine is “anything that does everything probably does nothing”.
One of the “blue zones” (places with long lives) famously had:
- No birth certificates
- A post war government pension to anyone over 60
So lots of 40 year olds in 1940 suddenly claimed to be and were recorded as 60. Then in 2000 100 (80), then in 2020 120 (100)
So what appeared to be exceptional lifespans were really just fraud
Though our telomere limit appears to be 120 or so, so maybe some are trying the truth
How so? Cancer is something that one would be statistically likely to get eventually if you didn’t first die of anything else I suppose, so it’d certainly be useful in extending effective lifespan if you already had a youth serum, but how would a treatment for cancer do anything for other age related disease?
You get cancer all the time your body has natural mechanisms of finding and breaking down the cancerous cells. As we age some of these mechanisms start to falter, cells divide, but small errors over time accumulate.
A youth serum is really not the goal, the goal is fixing errors in these systems, maintaining current functions and creating a new mechanism.
This would work like a booster for this mechanisms and effectively make it possible to maintain and improve these systems. The side effect being an increase lifespan to some degree.
I suppose this I just the cancer component, but several other things are still needed on the field of longevity research for a “youth serum” to be viable.
I hope so much that this isn’t a predecessor to this.
An immediate red flag:
“Now if you replace that man with a cop … 🤷 … the picture changes”
Lol look at this fake leftist pretending to hate cops
No, but it gives you autism though /s
Uhh ohh, better raise the price then.
The article doesn’t go into much in the way of details, so I can’t begin to say how it might extend into the treatment of other cancers, but it does make it clear that this treatment is specifically for melanoma only. Which is great–it’s a deadly cancer. But without more information, we shouldn’t get too excited about this being able to treat other types of cancer.
I would be extremely surprised if this approach only worked for melanoma. I expect this is just the first cancer type they’ve tried applying it to. Some excitement is warranted here, IMO.
IDK, after that I took two doses of Pfizer vaccine (which is a mRNA vaccine) I started to show some heart issues that I never had in my life. I’m even seeing a cardiologist. I’m not trying to be anti-vaccine but I admit that after that I am afraid of mRNA vaccines.
