Scancell Share Discussion Threads

[fragma] 11/5/2021 10:42

Empty end- in the Seychelles, 59% of people had the sinopharm(Chinese) vaccine.No surprise there then as it only has a 51% efficacy.

[oldnotwise] 11/5/2021 08:01

21/21
Bid Ind only.
"Choice" price first thing! (well sort of).

[gazza] 10/5/2021 22:21

Loggy, That is a dreadful thing to say, shame on you.

[geckotheglorious] 10/5/2021 18:06

Panama,

The big question is how many days AFTER their second injection did they catch Covid.
Effectiveness doesnt reach maximum until 12 ish days after your second dose..and even then, they are only 80-95% efficacious (ie you still can catch the virus because you aren't 100% protected)

[panama7] 10/5/2021 17:26

EE, that's not a very good advert for the injection is it ?

[ivyspivey] 10/5/2021 15:21

Thanks Marcus.
Other changes are completion in Dec 1st rather than 30th Sept plus Robert Miller has replaced Sally Adams as Trial contact

[emptyend] 10/5/2021 15:20

BloombergTV noting today that Covid19 cases in the Seychelles have doubled in a week, with 37% of cases being people who have been fully vaccinated with two doses of either the AZ or Sino vaccine. The Seychelles is the most vaccinated population in the world....

[marcusl2] 10/5/2021 14:42

1 Recruiting SCIB1 in Melanoma Patients Receiving Pembrolizumab SCIB1-002
Malignant Melanoma
Biological: SCIB1 administered with a small, hand-held electroporation device (TDS-IM v2.0).
Device: Electroporation device (TDS-IM v2.0).
Velindre University NHS Trust
Cardiff, United Kingdom
East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust
Northwood, United Kingdom
Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust
Nottingham, United Kingdom
Oxford University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
Oxford, United Kingdom

KonarA

.

Now recruiting.

East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust

[marcusl2] 10/5/2021 10:50

Covid was just the start. Next we'll make a vaccine for cancer
Scientists are learning to harness a 'game-changing' technique that has the potential to defeat a range of humanity's deadliest foes

By
Harry de Quetteville
10 May 2021 • 5:00am
cancer vaccine
mRNA technology can be updated to carry instructions to our cells that could vaccinate against diseases, including HIV and cancer
Drew Weissman is not ready to rest on his laurels. He’s already thinking about the next coronavirus variant – the one that will come after the Indian variant, or the Kent variant or the South African variant, and demolish the defences of our vaccines. Or rather, to give him his due, his vaccines.

“Moderna has already started a clinical trial with the South African variant,” he says. “Pfizer is doing the same. My concern is, I don’t think that’s the right approach.” Soon enough, he says, pharma companies will have to update again, and then again, in an eternal battle of cat and mouse.

Wouldn’t it be better, he says, if Covid vaccines worked not by identifying what makes variants different but against what they have in common. He’s doing just that. “We’re making a vaccine that will protect against every variant that’s ever been produced and should protect against all possible variants that appear in the future.”

It’s a bold claim. But Weissman isn’t finished there. “We’ve had three coronavirus epidemics in 20 years [Sars, Mers and Covid]. It would be foolish to think we’re not going to have more. So we’ve also been working on our pan-coronavirus vaccine.”

Coming from anyone else, such claims of a universal shot against one of humanity’s deadliest viral foes might sound fanciful. But Weissman, professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, is notably reserved and softly spoken on our Zoom call. And perhaps most importantly, he has form to back his claims up, for in the past year his life’s work has transformed human health.

“My wife and kids get mad at me because I don’t show the enjoyment of the accomplishment,̶1; he says, stroking the ears of his immense white cat, Xander.

That accomplishment has been to develop not just a vaccine for Covid, but a whole new vaccine technology which, instead of priming our immune response by injecting us with bits of virus (like the AstraZeneca vaccine), uses a genetic courier called mRNA (messenger RNA) to teach our bodies how to build those bits themselves.


The technique, never deployed before the pandemic, has been astonishingly successful. Moderna and Pfizer vaccines, which both use it, have a 95 per cent effectiveness rate, compared with about 82 per cent for AstraZeneca.

More significant even than that, however, is the fact that like any courier, mRNA can be loaded with new parcels while maintaining the same delivery mechanism, meaning it can be updated to carry instructions to our cells that could vaccinate against malaria or herpes, or fight back and beat cancer and HIV. From the ashes of the pandemic’s destruction is rising the phoenix of a medical revolution. “It’s a game changer,” says Dr Zoltan Kis at Imperial College London’s Future Vaccine Manufacturing Hub.

For a long time, however, it did not look like it was going to work at all. In the late 1990s Weissman, who was working on dendritic cells – “the cells that start all new immune reactions” – met Kati Kariko, who was working with RNA. The pair decided to put their two subjects of interest together. They realised that, if it worked, their system would be able to deliver instructions so that the body could build specific proteins – to calm inflammation in stroke patients, say, or deliver a vital protein called CFTR to cystic fibrosis sufferers. “We knew when we first started it had enormous potential,” says Weissman. There was just one problem. “It was unusable.”

Every time he and Kariko tested it on mice, “the mouse got sick” with chronic inflammation. Its immune response was out of control. “We worked to solve that inflammation for seven years,” he says. In 2005, they cracked it. “We could now deliver any therapeutic protein we wanted.”

But the path is rarely straightforward when it comes to the multi-billion dollar business of developing new medicines. “We talked to pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies, venture capitalists, and they all basically said, ‘Yeah, we’ve been burned by RNA before, and it’s too hard to work with.’ It took a lot of work to convince people.” Only after the founding in 2010 of the biotech company Moderna did Weissman and Kariko find a receptive audience. “Soon after that we spoke to BioNTech,” where Kariko now works, and which eventually developed the Pfizer vaccine.

In the last decade, Weissman has been working on a variety of vaccines, with five in trials before Covid hit – including a universal flu vaccine, and two for HIV. But then, in early 2020, news of a novel virus began emerging from China. Its genetic code was posted online on January 10. “We started working on Covid on January 12,” says Weissman. Vaccine development had traditionally taken years. But on March 16, just two months later, Moderna put its Covid vaccine to clinical trial.

Moderna took just two months to put its vaccine into clinical trials
Moderna took just two months to put its vaccine into clinical trials CREDIT: Apu Gomes/AFP
Speed of development is just one of mRNA’s benefits (“plug in a new variant and in days you’re ready to go,” says Weissman). A second is manufacturing. In contrast to traditional vaccines, says Kis, “there are no living cells involved in the making of the RNA. It’s synthetic. A biochemical process, simple, easy to purify it and to show quality, a much cleaner approach.” Much less also goes much further. “Ten litres of RNA could make as many doses as 1,000 litres of the conventional process.”

Kis sees three stages to develop the potential of mRNA therapies. In the immediate term, they can be directed at infectious diseases like Covid, which Kis calls “the low-hanging fruit”. In the long term, they can be used to deliver gene-editing tools inside the body to fix inherited diseases like sickle cell. In the medium term, however, Kis sees the advent of personalised cancer vaccines.

Weissman explains how they would work: “You take out a piece of lung tumour or breast cancer or colon cancer or melanoma and sequence it” to reveal its genetic code. Such codes in cancer have many mutations, and a vaccine is based on those specific mutations, prompting the immune system to attack the cancer cells while leaving the body’s cells unharmed. The technique has been shown to work well in melanoma, and less so in other cancers. But BioNTech already has one cancer vaccine in a phase two (of three) trial “looking at a whole bunch of different cancers”.

As with many cutting edge techniques, the cost of such a vaccine would currently be prohibitive – “probably hundreds of thousands of dollars” says Weissman. But as the plunging price of gene sequencing has shown, costs can tumble dramatically as breakthrough technology becomes widely adopted.

It is in genetic medicine that Weissman hopes to make the biggest breakthrough, by loading up his RNA courier with a gene-editing tool called Crispr. The problem is hitting the right target in the body – typically the particles end up in the dendritic cells or being flushed out to the liver. But Weissman says that, as with the mouse inflammation of old, he has now overcome this big hurdle. “We’ve addressed that over the past couple of years. We can now target bone marrow stem cells,” – a path to curing sickle cell – “we can target T-cells… for HIV cure.”

Weissman cannot prevent a trickle of excitement permeating his self-contained manner as he describes such possibilities. “There is huge potential,” he says. “Not everything is going to work. But some of it will. And we and others are going to keep developing this to get as many things to work to treat these diseases.”

He is fully aware that, without the Covid pandemic, his work and its spin-offs would not be receiving the money and attention it now is. “Covid has certainly catapulted RNA into everybody’s language and changed vaccine development,” he says. It is a clearly a strange feeling being such a profound beneficiary of an event which has caused such disaster for so many.

It could have been very different. Like many researchers, having faced so many difficulties over so many years, he was primed for another disappointment when the effectiveness of mRNA vaccines was finally revealed last year.

“In animal trials of maybe 30 other vaccines – for everything from HIV, malaria, TB to influenza – we’d always get 100 per cent. But I’ll be honest. I was really nervous that the efficacy for this might be 50 per cent or 70 per cent and I wouldn’t have an explanation.”

Then the data came out: 95 per cent effective. “I was so relieved. Back in the beginning we’d seen the potential as enormous. And it was finally coming true.”

[miavoce] 10/5/2021 07:51

Article in the telegraph today talking about mRNA and potential for cancer vaccines. I've added a comment ref SCLP - other subscribers may wish to do the same.

[panama7] 09/5/2021 12:00

Marcus, they will have an even bigger stockpile after Tucker Carlson blew the doors off on Friday.

[marcusl2] 09/5/2021 10:03

Scott Gottlieb, MD
@ScottGottliebMD
·
16h
FT reports on the political motives behind Biden Administration decision to waive TRIPs protections on vaccine IP. FT sources: it was done to win diplomatic favor and deflect criticism of growing U.S. vaccine stockpile that could be helping global citizens

[albert arthur] 08/5/2021 15:31

We've moved the Sunday roast from Sharetalk to Vox. We want to make the roast interactive and would like your input on what topics you'd like us to discuss, also what stocks you'd like us to crunch. We have moved from the channel to a group. The link is here, feel free to join: https://t.me/joinchat/1tizcwHr6gxlOGI8 AlbertArthur

[goyathlay] 08/5/2021 09:25

In other news:

""Covid will no longer be circulating in Britain by August, one of the UK's top vaccine experts has predicted, as cases of the virus continue to plunge.

In an interview with The Telegraph a week after stepping down as interim head of the vaccine taskforce, Clive Dix said the population would be safe from the disease in a matter of months. "Sometime in August, we will have no circulating virus in the UK," he said.

The UK remained on track to meet its target of giving all adults at least one Covid jab by the end of July, he said.

Mr Dix said this should give adequate protection against both the original Covid strain and all known variants of the disease, meaning booster vaccinations could be delayed from autumn until next year.""


Worth clicking on the link to see his Steatorrhoea Knitwear.

[torquayfan] 08/5/2021 00:14

Not new but just arrived in my inbox again . . . it is, of course, more than likely that any CEPI support to Scancell, would result in Scancell (and Partners) then making a commitment to Covax. IMO that's not a problem in any way at all - let's just hope 'Covidity' gets that far ! GLA

"Two more CEPI-supported COVID-19 vaccine developers, Novavax and Moderna, have announced agreements with our partner Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance to supply vaccines to COVAX. Novavax will supply 350 million doses of its COVID-19 vaccine from as soon as it has secured regulatory approval, which could be as early as Q3 2021. A total of 1.1 billion doses of the Novavax vaccine are expected to be made available to COVAX, with the remaining volumes set to be supplied through the Serum Institute of India. Moderna will provide 500 million doses to the COVAX Facility, with initial supply for low- and middle-income countries.

CEPI’s $388 million investment in Novavax supported Phase 1 and 2 trials and large-scale manufacturing of Novavax’s vaccine candidate. Investing at this early stage in manufacturing has been critical in boosting capacity and will ensure these life-saving vaccines get to where they are most needed as quickly as possible. These deals join another CEPI-supported vaccine developed by the University of Oxford/ AstraZeneca which has already been rolled out to millions worldwide through COVAX.

To date, 54 million doses have been delivered to 121 economies globally through COVAX. These developments mark a critical milestone in advancing global vaccine distribution and equity - saving lives and helping to alleviate the devastating effects of this pandemic worldwide."

[panama7] 07/5/2021 21:19

Dominic, they are too busy hiding behind the couch wearing a double mask to look beyond the BBC and SKY.

[fragma] 07/5/2021 17:20

I suppose theres no rule saying he cant be both ?

[fragma] 07/5/2021 17:19

I cant decide if p7 is just really thick or just a wind up ?

[wigwammer] 07/5/2021 14:14

P7 should send DC his wu tang stylee rap about covid. Bruvvers will be keepin it real bout da troof of dis covid manipulation. Perhaps Ali G will pop along :)

[dominiccummings] 07/5/2021 13:18

#39106 it's of no concern to me. Just another bit of 'fear' tactics to keep the plebs on board.