A friend just sent this link to me. I thought this group may find it interesting…
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My initial reaction was, “Vaccine? No way!” But as I read the article, I changed my mind and found it most intriguing. This is definitely “thinking outside the box”. Thanks for posting.
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Wow, this does sound promising! Thank you for sharing!
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This really is exciting. Vertex, CellTrans, and other researchers have proven it’s possible to establish new beta cells, but struggle with the immune system side of the equation, to preserve those beta cells. Combine them with an inverse vaccine, though, and you’ve seriously got something.
Surely it needs a better name than “inverse vaccine”, though. I also thought , “BS!” until I read what it was.
Looking forward to reading the full study!
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I’ve been seeing the trials for these vaccines for years but they only were taking newly diagnosed. I’m glad to see some movement.
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I was once told (many years ago when I was in the USA) that there was a gag order on a “cure” for T1D… and whether that’s true or not, just thinking about it logically - if there was a cure and we all stopped needing the immense amount of medication and devices etc etc can you imagine how many people and companies would be put out of work - so in that sense I can understand why coming out with a cure as such might have a lot of roadblocks, even though I obviously don’t think it’s right & want a cure cause if there is, it saves lives essentially but its just another side to think about with why there isn’t a cure yet 
For years I have been convinced that there have been cures found for a great many diseases, including diabetes. Can you imagine pharmaceuticals foregoing all those profits “for the people”? NOT! There is NO altruism in these companies. Their only concern is PROFIT at any cost.
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Even if diabetes dropped off the list, I suspect there are enough other diseases, illnesses, and everyday complaints to keep the profits rolling in. And if there’s one big gag order, isn’t it a little surprising that not one of the 3.83 million pharmaceutical workers in the world – not to mention government researchers and academia and all the R&D going on outside of the big pharmaceutical companies – has spoken up about it?
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And how many cures, real cures, have there been since the two polio vaccines came out in the late 1950s, early 1960s? Has there been a cure for the various cancers, rates of which are increasing? Autoimmune diseases such as diabetes, MS, RA, etc.? Yes, there are many treatments offered, most of which, such as chemotherapy, that actually do little to cure and a lot to harm.
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It’s really not so obvious the way it’s done. No one is sitting on the cure to prevent us from getting it.
The truth is that research money is not funding cures, they are funding treatments.
Also pharma companies are funding treatments, so no one is really looking for cures. Not that they are hiding an existing cure
There is a fine line here with the same outcome, but it’s not realistic to believe in the conspiracy theory thst cures are hidden and we can’t speak about them.
Now this company thst comes up with a cure, will make billions at the outset, and millions down the road because there will be new diagnoses coming down the pipe.
Maybe we will get a cure, maybe we won’t, but at least someone is actually putting a little bit of money into it finally.
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Perhaps, with the knowledge we have at this point, cures are simply unattainable. Like cold fusion or the “forever” battery. Cures for autoimmune disorders have proven particularly elusive. But people keep working at it. Before the 20th century, the concept of antibiotics – or, since you mentioned it, the polio vaccine – would have struck many people as farfetched. With the knowledge they had at the time, they couldn’t get there, but we did in time and with deepening knowledge. With recent breakthroughs, such as the one this thread is about, cures inch within reach.
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Not many research projects like this one. It’s about time…
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I respectfully disagree. There’s a huge amount of research going on, not just into cures directly but into treatments that can open the way to cures. It isn’t sexy, though, so it tends not to get announced or followed in the general media unless there’s a momentous breakthrough or a researcher wins a major award (as in the case of Dr. Daniel Drucker at UofT, whose research into diabetes was unknown to most people until he won the Wolf Prize in Medicine this year). The online National Library of Medicine and Nature Portfolio are just two repositories of current research and clinical trials.
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I suppose it all depends upon how you define cure. Most of what I read (and this group is great at posting anything new and interesting that crops up regarding diabetes) re current research seems to be about implanting beta cells within some kind of barrier to prevent Tcells from attacking. This research, however, approaches from a completely new direction with a true cure that does not depend upon any kind of gadget or procedure that would need periodic expensive replenishment to continue. It definitely bears watching as it develops.
Thanks so much for sharing this. That sounds promising. It’s great to see scientific and medical progress at work… especially when it affects something so personal… Kudos to empirical research and the scientific method, and people able and willing to apply it!
With all the antigens that test for T1D, multiple vaccines targeting each would seem to be needed.
Might be part of cure, but not a cure in and of itself. If autoimmune disfunction is caught early enough, it could prevent onset of or stop progression of the disease.
This is an important point I hadn’t considered before hearing a talk at the last TCOYD conference.
Here’s the introduction so you know who is talking:
Here is where they start talking about cell replacement as a cure.
I think the title of this thread is revolting. A company is working to develop a vaccine for humans. Fun, but still 10 years away if everything goes right.
Interesting. I am happy to see that someone is trying something different, and I sincerely hope that such advances can someday keep people from developing diseases like MS and T1D. I agree that this study is in its infancy and that none of us will see any widespread use of this for a while, but like everything else, it has to start somewhere.
I do too, but don’t blame the thread creator because that was the name of the cited article’s title. I object to reporting secondary sources because the best of them distort what the original source material said, and all they are driven by a need for views. Many misuse words or words not in the source material and by omission exaggeration and substitution of words unconsciously create lies. Some go a step further and sensationalize what they report with superlatives. The cited source did that.
Very few research papers make positive declarative statements about benefits. Credible ones always have qualifiers - statistics and limitations stated about the study and relevance of findings.
“May” and “can” are often used in research papers conclusions and their abstract’s summaries. Both these words are qualifiers because science has no absolutes. (Even the speed of light and time aren’t always the same under all conditions.) “May” in science means potentially possible. "Can’ means proven possible under some conditions.
This is frequently forgotten by “reporters” when creatively writing the secondary report, when a qualified finding is interpreted into a positive, exaggerated statement that is not an accurate report of what was originally stated.
eg. A person in Chicago looks out their windows and sees clouds. They report to a friend in Florida that “there are clouds and it looks like it’s going to be raining later in Chicago”. That’s an original report, and a guess. (If the person in Chicago is Tom Skilling, a weatherman, he’s still guessing. ) The person in Florida calls a friend in Arizona and says that “a friend in Chicago says it’s going to be raining”. That’s a secondary report. The next time the message is passed along, it is interpreted as “it’s raining in Chicago”. That’s a tertiary report.
Each subsequent report contained some words of the original report, but distorted it to be less true.
A bad reporter - one who doesn’t speak the same language as the original reporter, who doesn’t understand what they said, and/or doesn’t quote them precisely, can distort the original information beyond recognition, and transform an indication of a possibility into a statement that doesn’t mean what the original report said. It gets worse when “Youtube-like” exaggeration is used in headlines to attract eyes and clicks. .
The cited article says that the vaccine demonstrated the ability to block the immune response involved in a “multiple sclerosis -like” disease. The vaccine has not been tested against ANY disease in vivo, but only in a lab.
To prove it scoientfically, a large group of people who did not have MS would need to take the drug, and be compared to a similar large group who had not taken it, and the groups studied longer than the average onset age. The longer that the vaccinated group had no MS, the higher the effectiveness would be rated.
But while scientific studies are run like that, medical studies are not. Medicine uses a weak form of the engineering method, not the scientific method. Medicine starts applying “preventive treatments” based on results of uncontrolled studies assuming that the studies were well designed, performed and reported. Such studies can only provide statistics, and “statistically significant” results of pre-determined outcomes are the metric for success.
If a medical treatment is believed to have relative benefits compared to doing nothing, and is observed to be relatively safe it is deployed, often widely. Absolute risk to benefit is sometimes considered after the cost to benefit ratio is . This is why there are drug recalls after years of prescriptions, why preventive treatments of cheaply produced drugs continue to be widely prescribed after the assumptions of the original research are invalidated.
IF a vaccine were proven to arrest the progression of one disease, that would be suggestive. It wouldn’t be evidence that it: would always work, would do the same with another disease, that the side effects of the vaccine would be benign, or that it would reverse the damage any disease caused.
When a disease destroys specialized cells, as with type 1 diabetes, unless the body has a viable reserve of those cells or has the ability to produce more of them, the disease cannot be reversed. If the body did have that ability, a vaccine wouldn’t reverse the disease. A drug that enhanced the body’s ability to heal itself would.
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