Author Topic: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?  (Read 218193 times)

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1640 on: August 27, 2021, 10:50:21 AM »
The vaccine triggers the body to create antibodies, they body chooses which type of antibodies it makes. Maybe they can find a way that consistently triggers these antibodies, but FWIU there is no sure way to trigger these specific antibodies.
It may be able to be done with mRNA. My very basic understanding is that they can but I may very well be mistaken.
It may very well end up happening, but it is only once there are more conclusive results that this antibody is so effective that they would even start developing it.
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Offline avromie7

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1641 on: August 27, 2021, 11:16:40 AM »
It may be able to be done with mRNA. My very basic understanding is that they can but I may very well be mistaken.
It may very well end up happening, but it is only once there are more conclusive results that this antibody is so effective that they would even start developing it.
The way I understand it, they can decide which spike they want to mimic, but they can't decide which antibody the body creates to fight it. I don't understand how they would be able to trigger a specific antibody response, unless a specific spike is most likely to trigger the wanted antibody. Am I missing something?
I wonder what people who type "u" instead of "you" do with all their free time.

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1642 on: August 27, 2021, 11:32:04 AM »
The way I understand it, they can decide which spike they want to mimic, but they can't decide which antibody the body creates to fight it. I don't understand how they would be able to trigger a specific antibody response, unless a specific spike is most likely to trigger the wanted antibody. Am I missing something?
If that is the spike that needs to be targeted and the only spike mimiced is that one then the antibody should target that specific spike.
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Offline avromie7

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1643 on: August 27, 2021, 12:42:22 PM »
If that is the spike that needs to be targeted and the only spike mimiced is that one then the antibody should target that specific spike.
Maybe I misunderstood, but I think the antibody we want is an antibody that attacks all spikes.
I wonder what people who type "u" instead of "you" do with all their free time.

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1644 on: August 27, 2021, 12:44:08 PM »
Maybe I misunderstood, but I think the antibody we want is an antibody that attacks all spikes.

My understanding is that there is an individual string that seems to be least likely to mutate and the antibodies that attack this individual chain are the ones we are looking for.
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Offline biobook

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1645 on: August 27, 2021, 06:04:19 PM »
Your ability to dumb things down enough that I feel like a genius after reading it is amazing
I know nothing about this subject - biochemistry and biophysics - so I'm the dummy here, and needed to dumb it down to understand it myself.  The news article is recent, but the reference article on the bottom was published 6 weeks ago, so I figured someone must have written a simplification of it by now.

The first one I found was in Nature, the same journal that published the research article.  Research articles are written in highly detailed technical language, so that other scientists working in the same field can grasp exactly what was done.  The downside is that scientists are unlikely to read articles outside their narrow field of work so some journals will include a user-friendly summary of important papers, written by a science journalist. 
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-01917-9

That was kind of short, so I searched again, and found another article, this time posted on the website of the institution where the research was done.  Some institutions have staff writers who may help researchers with grant writing, or write PR releases for reporters, or produce the glossy magazines used for fundraising, etc.  The article that I linked to above was written by a science writer who has graduate degrees in both immunology and journalism, so it's an especially clear description of this project and a few others. 
https://www.fredhutch.org/en/news/center-news/2021/07/novel-coronavirus-immunity.html

I couldn't have written what I did without those.

Offline biobook

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1646 on: August 27, 2021, 06:46:08 PM »
If it can be given prophylactically, can they develop a vaccine that would get the body to produce the same antibody?

/Spoken like the true science novice that I am
Why can't they make vaccines that also do that?
Yes, that's also the goal.  I don't know how they would do it, and haven't researched this part, but here's a guess, totally out of the air, like I said, this is much further from the areas that I've said before are not my field...

The spike protein (like all proteins) is made up of a chain of amino acids.  The mRNA is also a chain, made up of nucleotides, which provides the instructions for the cell to make the spike protein.  Three nucleotides say put this amino acid here, the next three nucleotides say put that amino acid next to it, etc.  So the sequence of nucleotides in this particular mRNA (in the vaccine) are the instructions for creating the sequence of amino acids in the spike protein.

Once the immune cells see the newly manufactured spike protein, they start to make antibodies against it.  The antibodies are also proteins, but they're much smaller than the spike protein, so they can create antibodies that attack different parts of spike.  One antibody might bind only to the bottom of spikes, another only to the tip.  In this picture, the long spike protein is shown as a red and blue strand, folded up into the spike shape.  The blue part is the part that will bind to the ACE2 receptor.   The antibodies are smaller, with a light blue Y-shaped antibody able to bind the RBD, and a pink antibody able to bind to the red part of the spike.


from a video by Tyler Starr, the first author of the article
&t=186s

This novel antibody, which they found in one person, binds to a sequence of the amino acids which are hidden inside the spike RBD, and are "visible" to the cell only when the spike is about to bind the ACE2 receptor and the spike RBD opens up to expose that amino acid sequence. 

So perhaps if there were a slight change in the amino acid sequence, the spike RBD could be locked in that open position, and thereby the hidden region would always be exposed.  They could then create the appropriate mRNA sequence that would be used to make the appropriate modified spike that always displays that previously hidden region.  Then, when the immune cells see that particular spike, they'll make the antibodies to the previously hidden region. 

Or perhaps they can learn what signal normally causes the spike to open up when it approaches the ACE2 receptor.  Perhaps it's some chemical, and then the vaccine we have today, with mRNA for a normal spike, might also include a chemical signal that would cause the spike to open and expose that region to the immune cells.

I'm totally making this up, don't have time now to research it. 

But one other thing I found last night is that this general approach, looking for antibodies that bind to a broad range of viruses, is being studied by other scientists.  Here's one published a couple weeks ago, Ultrapotent antibodies against diverse and highly transmissible SARS-CoV-2 variants.  The 5th author is a frum guy, clearly not on DDF or he'd be answering these questions.  Maybe @Dan can invite him for an AMA?
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/373/6556/eabh1766


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Offline AsherO

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1648 on: September 26, 2021, 03:58:09 PM »
https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/314012

How do they know it’s causative? There could be many potential reasons for correlation.
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Offline Moshe123

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1650 on: October 01, 2021, 08:18:29 AM »
Amazing news. Bh

Offline dovy2

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1651 on: October 01, 2021, 08:52:01 AM »
How expensive is it? If it's too cheap, no way FDA will improve  :P

Offline S209

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1653 on: October 01, 2021, 09:55:02 AM »
How expensive is it? If it's too cheap, no way FDA will improve  :P
Makes sense. If it is too cheap then there is no way the studies done were adequate.
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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1654 on: October 01, 2021, 10:03:53 AM »
$700 for a 5 day supply

Offline Moshe123

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1655 on: October 01, 2021, 10:38:54 AM »
$700 for a 5 day supply

This really isn't a lot in the big scheme.

Also, I think it's quite obvious why pretty much all treatments etc are being developed here. Profit is a major incentive for innovation.
The United States is pretty much sponsoring the entire world's socialized medicine.

Offline avromie7

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1656 on: October 01, 2021, 02:34:20 PM »
This really isn't a lot in the big scheme.

Also, I think it's quite obvious why pretty much all treatments etc are being developed here. Profit is a major the only real incentive for innovation.
The United States is pretty much sponsoring the entire world's socialized medicine.
FTFY.
I wonder what people who type "u" instead of "you" do with all their free time.

Offline S209

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1657 on: October 03, 2021, 11:08:42 AM »
FTFY.
Fame and recognition are also large motivators, among others, although profit is generally the major driver of innovation.
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Offline avromie7

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1658 on: October 03, 2021, 11:58:53 AM »
Fame and recognition are also large motivators, among others, although profit is generally the major driver of innovation.
Like the military researchers who concluded that a flying machine was impossible, shortly before the Wright brothers invented the plane?
I wonder what people who type "u" instead of "you" do with all their free time.

Offline yesitsme

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Re: Is there any good news in the fight against COVID-19?
« Reply #1659 on: October 03, 2021, 12:11:53 PM »
Like the military researchers who concluded that a flying machine was impossible, shortly before the Wright brothers invented the plane?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon_Newcomb#:~:text=On%20the%20impossibility%20of%20a%20flying%20machine%5Bedit%5D
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