Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials

Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by tialaramex on Monday January 31, 2022 @01:57PM (#30152446)

Both the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine and Sputnik are using a pretty similar trick that gives them the speed-up. They still get to pick an arbitrary sequence, but they're smuggling it inside a virus instead of as mRNA.

That's why the codename for the AstraZeneca vaccine is ChAdOx1, it's a Chimp Adenovirus as host for the sequence. Take this mild uninteresting chimpanzee virus, but tweak it to tell human cells to produce your arbitrary sequence instead of itself. The humans become immune to whatever your sequence was (and maybe to Chimp Adenoviruses?).

I'm sure there are reasons this might be better in some cases, and it involved less bleeding edge technology which made it a safer bet in a pandemic, but the mRNA approach seems obviously more general and even perhaps more re-usable.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by dpark on Monday January 31, 2022 @02:31PM (#30152986)

> and maybe to Chimp Adenoviruses

Which is a major problem with this technique. One of the other vaccines (J&J?) used a relatively harmless human virus and as I recall, some people with previous exposure had no effect from the vaccine.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by morpheuskafka on Monday January 31, 2022 @04:06PM (#30154349)

Likewise, it would seem that after one vaccine using a given vector, completely unrelated vaccines using the same vector would be ineffective? So presumably they would eventually run out of all the accessible vectors.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by semerda on Monday January 31, 2022 @03:42PM (#30153997)

I wouldn't call it arbitrary sequence, it's a specific sequence ie. s protein for covid.

Saying that, it's now a known cause of blood clotting in some recipients: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abl8213

"chimpanzee adenovirus Y25 (ChAdOx1), human adenovirus type 5 (HAd-V-C5) and human adenovirus type 26 (HAdV-D26) — the scientists found that ChAdOx1 had a strong negative charge, which meant that it attracted PF4, which has a positive charge."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Moderna’s HIV vaccine has officially begun human trials by selcuka on Monday January 31, 2022 @09:18PM (#30157814)

> but the mRNA approach seems obviously more general and even perhaps more re-usable

We should also see how subunit protein vaccines such as Novavax will perform once they are widely available. From what it looks they should be equally effective and more anti-vaxxer friendly.

[ Parent | on HN ]