Engineers design programmable RNA vaccines: Tests in mice show they work against Ebola, influenza, and common parasite
http://phys.org/news/2016-07-programmable-rna-vaccines-mice-ebola.html
MIT engineers have developed a new type of easily customizable vaccine that can be manufactured in one week, allowing it to be rapidly deployed in response to disease outbreaks. So far, they have designed vaccines against Ebola, H1N1 influenza, and Toxoplasma gondii (a relative of the parasite that causes malaria), which were 100 percent effective in tests in mice.
The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which can be designed to code for any viral, bacterial, or parasitic protein. These molecules are then packaged into a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells, where it is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host.
In addition to targeting infectious diseases, the researchers are using this approach to create cancer vaccines that would teach the immune system to recognize and destroy tumors.
"This nanoformulation approach allows us to make vaccines against new diseases in only seven days, allowing the potential to deal with sudden outbreaks or make rapid modifications and improvements," says Daniel Anderson, an associate professor in MIT's Department of Chemical Engineering and a member of MIT's Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).
Anderson is the senior author of a paper describing the new vaccines in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of July 4, 2016. The project was led by Jasdave Chahal, a postdoc at MIT's Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research, and Omar Khan, a postdoc at the Koch Institute; both are the first authors of the paper.
>>55571
>a molecule that delivers the RNA into cells
a.k.a. a virus.
The technique of using custom-made viruses to deliver custom-made RNA to cells is not that new (and the theory is very old). (Obviously this particular technique with vaccines is new and awesome.)
But just take a second to appreciate this: we stop a disease by infecting people with a virus that we create that injects custom 4-ary code into individual cells that hijacks their machinery to produce a large complex organic molecule with a specific affinity to the agent of said disease.
Shit, it's hard enough writing code to do that to vaccinate a computer network, and that's a million times fewer units and written in a 5th-generation programming language instead of a maze of folded strings of amino acids.
>>55596
True that.
No matter what people say, this will be the future for humanity. After a while we'll stop messing around with viruses, but instead program and edit our own genes.
>>55628
mind=blown
We can finally create the Ubermensch that hitler wanted
>>55667
Hitler liked to paint as well. No one should paint anymore because of that, just to be safe. You don't know what it could lead to...
Thank you for this post, actually brightens my day without being a "feel good" story.
I remember working with viral vectors for obesity research on hormones from fat cells. Neat stuff, didn't know it had gotten this far in such a short time.
>>55571
Thank God humanity will not succumb to a plauge super bugs are no longer a problem
Forgive me, but what's wrong with nature's way? Death is a given, immortality is hell. Id love to see what 2541 is like, but thats for my grand^12children to see.
Have you people not seen what the population is lately? Every death by natural cause should be welcomed.
>IB4 your reply is too brutally honest, I dislike it!
>>55724
Population is declining in the developed world even though life expectancy (*not lifespan) is increasing, and family size declines as the developing world modernizes, so your concern about medical technology leading to overpopulation at least seems warrantless currently.
Philosophically, metaphysically, you may be able to argue something. But in the meantime actual physics will do its thing.
>>55726
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
You're full of shit. The population is growing, and has slowed only slightly.
>>55726
Also, medical technology only brings up the topic, we as a society now regard death as an evil that we should never see.
>>55731
Didn't say the world population.
But I was still mostly wrong -- I should have said the birth rate in the most-developed world (richest per capita countries outside the Middle East) is no longer at replacement rate (though not for long enough that all such countries have seen declines in their non-new-immigrant population). Everything else is accurate though.
New vaccine = new kind of Autism?
>>55628
Let's keep people alive and make the overpopulation issue worse! :D
