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Comment by vibrio | Hacker News Reader

They did a great job with the mRNA vaccines, but they have been prolific in research for nearly decade. In my opinion a intersting question is whether infectious disease vaccines now matter to the "wealthy world", as infectious disease has largely been an economic backwater for Pharma/VC,etc. How mRNA vaccines play a role in that maybe interesting, as their product profile is mostly 'wealthy world friendly' at this point.

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I have been noting down pandemic silver linings, and this is one did not occur to me. To take your point further, given the workhorse industrialization the mRNA platform has been given during Covid, turning it on the other infectious diseases might mean millions or tens of millions lives saved over the coming decade or two. A (pseudo) black swan of a pandemic leads to a white swan!

A Malaria vaccine would be awesome. I have no idea if that’s possible though. I’ve known people with Malaria and have personally taken the (expensive) pills to protect myself. It all sucks.

Malaria is a parasite, not a virus. Doesn't it have to be a virus for mRNA vaccines to make sense?

There are vaccines against bacterial infections (tuberculosis, for example).

The tuberculosis vaccine might not be the best example, it lacks efficacy in some places, for an unknown reason or reasons, such as the US and India.

Does India still use BCG?

Yes, India still uses BCG.

It doesn't even have to be an exogenous disease. There are trials being scheduled for their use in autoimmune disease, IIRC, by sensitizing tnf-regulator cells to autoantigens (or perhaps consequent interleukins, I forget).

The have already been used to cure the mouse model of MS.

Nope! Just needs to be something with a stable, targetable antigen.

Not virus only, Moderna is working on a mRNA therapy for cancer for example. [1]

[1] https://www.modernatx.com/pipeline/therapeutic-areas/mrna-pe...

A mRNA vaccine basically sics our immune systems on something. Our immune systems are fairly adaptable and will kill even cancer cells if they can tell them apart from healthy tissue.

The hard part about vaccinating against Malaria isn’t the vaccine platform — it’s finding an antigen to target that has the desired effect. But there is progress on that front:

https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2021/03/01/a-...

The candidate does indeed use mRNA, but it seems like it could have used older technology too.

If you’ve written a blog post or even a comment here that mentions some of those silver linings I would be very interested to read the others!

The first generation were definitely first world only, but it looks like there are variations being developed that are more appropriate for less developed areas. The m1283 vaccine is currently under trials and is supposed to be stable at refrigerator temperatures.

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