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Comment by CodeGlitch | Hacker News Reader

Given the amount of research happening around Corona-viruses, will we see a vaccine for the Common Cold? Will the vaccination of the Common Cold eventually "pay-back" the money spent on dealing with COVID-19 as fewer people will take time off work to recover from the Cold?

Pretty exciting stuff in any case.

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From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_cold

> Well over 200 virus strains are implicated in causing the common cold, with rhinoviruses being the most common.

> Vaccination has proven difficult as there are many viruses involved and they mutate rapidly. Creation of a broadly effective vaccine is, therefore, highly improbable.

IIRC the virus in the rhinoviruses family mutates more rapidly than the virus in the coronavirus family.

> IIRC the virus in the rhinoviruses family mutates more rapidly than the virus in the coronavirus family.

This may be true, I don't know. I do know that my experience with coronavirus colds is that they hit much harder and have more severe symptoms compared to rhinovirus colds. So well worth taking out just the CV segment.

How did you know which type you had?

It's a conclusion from symptoms. Complete lack of upper respiratory involvement, heavy lung involvement, very hard immune response symptoms for 5 days(CV) vs copious runny nose, sneezing, stuffy head for 3 days (RV).

Does it mutate as fast as the influenza? If we could reduce the colds by the same amount we reduced the flu, it would already be a large gain.

We'll see how many of them are still around after The Great Hand-Washing of 2020

It seems that we will, the success of the current vaccine trials are derisking mRNA vaccines generally, which will make it cheaper to develop modern vaccines.

Correct me if I'm wrong but colds are a grab bag of a variety of ever mutating viruses. So we could nail one but not the other 500.

Yes I agree - but I read this [1] today, which talks about "universal" vaccines.

"RNA and DNA vaccines are so far experimental, but trials have been promising and many scientists believe it could be one of those two types that will be the model that goes into mass production to protect against COVID-19.

The attraction, say experts, is that they will potentially offer a step towards something that has been the holy grail of vaccine design – the universal vaccine.

The vaccines being trialed by the team from Pfizer, which tests show provides protection in 90% of cases, and from Moderna, which shows efficacy of 94.5%, are RNA vaccines. If either proves to be the winner in the race for a COVID vaccine, it will represent a seismic shift in vaccine technology."

[1] https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-how-vaccine-research-...

Interesting. The next paragraph explains more what they mean by that:

"Jeffrey Almond, a visiting professor of microbiology at William Dunn School of Pathology, University of Oxford, told Sky News: 'All the current vaccines we have: diptheria, whooping cough, polio, measles, papillomavirus, you name it; all of them are very different. You don't have a generic process to make them. You have a dedicated factory, a dedicated process, very different technologies.

"'What RNA and DNA offer is an escape from that. We can make the RNA by a single process in a single factory. All we have to do is change the sequence of the RNA or DNA.'"

Very cool, but not necessarily "universal" in the sense you'd need to target all the different rapidly-mutating cold viruses.

> "We can make the RNA by a single process in a single factory. All we have to do is change the sequence of the RNA or DNA."

That's really interesting! Imagine RNA vaccine creation "as a service." Researchers order fully-formed injectable vaccines for animal trials just by submitting a sequence. It would be like AWS for vaccines.

No, the hope is even greater: your doctor orders a fully formed injectable vaccine for the specific cancer that is currently growing in your body. Nobody else has exactly that same mutation, so there is no point in animal trails as the vaccine will only be helpful to you.

This vaccine is a great help to the above: it proves conclusively that the idea is sound. Probably future mRNA vaccines can skip all the phase 1-2 trials and go directly to 3. And for rare diesease they can even skip phase 3.

There's about 40, not 500; and it is tractable. Search for the section on 'common cold' in the following article:

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/life/article/COVID-vaccine-...

Yes if mRNA works well, we will probably get 95% effective vaccines within the next decade or two targeting diseases such as HIV, influenza, almost any virus basically.

And cancers

Source?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4668311/

Are you speaking from advanced knowledge? My understanding is that you still have to find a relatively stable binding site that doesn't have a high degree of similarity to human cell markers. So the mRNA technique is a great path from the identification of a binding site to a vaccine, with the difficulty of that identification not being particularly predictable.

HIV vaccines face tremendous challenges - almost 100% mortality rate if untreated, the fact that immune system activation helps the virus, very frequent mutations, lack of good targets for antibodies, etc. So don't hold your breath, mRNA is unlikely to help much in that case.

Alas, HIV isn't going to be easy - it mutates too fast. But mRNA is inherently safer and easier to produce than other vaccine platforms.

That's not the issue with HIV. The issue with HIV is that it's a retrovirus. It uses both reverse transcription and inscription enzymes to change your DNA.

A vaccine works to stimulate your immune system's "memory" that's evolved for treating infections. (That can be anti-bodies, but it's more complex .. also involves memory T-cells, the complement system, etc.)

When the same virus comes it, it will infect cells, but your body is much more prepared to handle it. The trouble with HIV is that it's the initial infection that can slowly inactivate an immune system over 2~5 years (not everyone though. Some people have HIV and never develop AIDS; known as Long Term Non-Progressives).

A vaccine wouldn't help at all with HIV. Keep in mind, the HIV rapid test checks for the presence of antibodies.

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