This is such a click bait headline. There is no new vaccine, scientists succeeded in a (small) test to link certain molecules with a specific antigen which would make the T cells stop targeting them, but that’s a wildly, hilarious massive leap to either claiming a vaccine or a cure for anything.
My son (who is 9) was diagnosed with celiac when he didn’t grow from age 2-3 (gluten -> guts make enzyme to digest it -> immune system sees enzyme making cells as invaders -> immune system attacks cells -> intestines swell -> nutrition stops being absorbed). He was effectively starving despite eating. He’s on track now as we have a strict gluten free household, and the fad people have created a market demand which makes companies want to make products that give him options…but a treatment like this would be life changing.
The good thing for him is that he was so young when he was diagnosed that he probably doesn’t know anything else. Saying this from personal experience as I was diagnosed at 14 months in mid 80s. Of course, something like this would be amazing as I can’t tolerate even small amounts of accidental gluten but as I don’t know anything else I can’t even imagine anything else.
Aye, the difference between me, diagnosed in preteens, and my friend, diagnosed at 3, is immense. I still have the odd craving and sometimes indulge with stupid results. She? Never even crosses her mind.
I’ve been following cures like this for years. There are three candidates in phase 2 trials right now that appear to work, they’re mostly figuring out the doses needed and there’s a big question on how long they last. Hopefully permanent but we don’t know for sure.
Diabetics have just been so beaten down by this whole thing. I was told the cure was 10 years away 40 years ago. Even if the technology described here works we could be another 15 years before we see it. Researchers said it could be here as soon as 5 years, which is true if unrealistically optimistic. I believe the cure is coming but I’m not holding my breath until I’m actually in front of a doctor about to receive the cure whatever it happens to be.
I was thinking of forwarding this to a friend with type 1 and remember the tale of misery from the last one I sent. Exactly what you said. She’s 38. Don’t get her hopes up.
You actually can, that’s the easy part surprisingly. The hard part is keeping the body from killing beta cells after you induce their growth which is why it’s not cured yet.
Look up Vertex. They have stem cell derived beta cells they’re looking to put in a pouch to avoid immune response, but AFAIK the production of the beta cells is a solved problem. They implanted those cells in someone and he’s seemingly cured.
It’s like all the revolutionary battery technologies, computer storage technologies, fusion, cure for cancer, anything with graphene in it, cure for immune diseases and all that. People just love to write clickbait articles about this stuff.
Developing these ideas in the lab takes decades, and turning those ideas into actual products takes even more time. When you see articles about these topics, you can be pretty sure you’ll never hear about it again.
Edit: Just to be clear: technology is going forward all the time, but news articles tend to fucus on things that are interesting or fascianting, and extrapolate from there. The technologies that actually end up becoming widespread might not be interesting enough to write about.
It’s difficult to pin down “when did mRNA research begin?” but, a pretty good date is to say, “The 1990s.” But you could go back as far as 1960 or 1970 if you were being technical.
mRNA technology is a HUGE breakthrough. Like I said, we were lucky it was essentially ready and able to help with the COVID vaccine development when it was.
Wait, are inverse vaccines the same as mRNA? That’s what I was wondering about. Have the inverse vaccines been on the research agenda for awhile? As I said before, I’m hoping the mRNA breakthroughs help the reverse vaccines go quicker.
Nope. In this case they figured out that you can “tag” molecules with N-acetylgalactosamine, and that convinces the Liver to tolerate the molecule that causes the immune reaction and signal the immune system. My wife has a major anaphylactic reaction to certain shrimp and this would be a game changer.
Graphene actually is used in small amounts in a few places today. The difficulty is still in scaling up production.
I won’t really know which computer storage technologies you’re referring to. There are plenty of different ones, most of them just have niche applications or are too expensive to replace today’s SSDs for general use, as SSD technology have gone a long way. It’s a similar story to batteries, honestly. Lithium is still just the cheapest for what it does, but alternatives for niche applications exist.
Fusion needs more funding, no way around that, otherwise the theory is sound.
But of course, it is true there’s tons of clickbait. But promising new developments do exist.
Before SSDs became widespread, the tech news would usually find a way to include an article about a revolutionary new storage technology that could store 100x more than a CD. Yes, that was a long time ago, and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again.
700 MB was the typical capacity of a CD. 100 times 700 MB is 70000 MB, ~70 GB.
Conventional (or “pre-BD-XL”) Blu-ray Discs contain 25 GB per layer, with dual-layer discs (50 GB) being the industry standard for feature-length video discs. Triple-layer discs (100 GB) and quadruple-layer discs (128 GB) are available for BD-XL re-writer drives. source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu-ray
SSDs nowadays can hold multiple TB of data, and HDDs can get even bigger in capacity 20 TB HDDs are available for consumers.
and no, we didn’t hear from those technologies ever again. source: you :D
I was mainly thinking of all the countless articles I saw in various magazines in the 90s and 00s. It was pretty wild what people were thinking what storage of the future would look like. Then DVDs and higher capacity HDDs came along. In the end, they actually ended up having the capacity that the articles were speaking of. It’s just that the technology wasn’t quite so creative.
Also, we didn’t really replace the floppy disk with one of those revolutionary technologies the articles were talking about. Floppies simply died out when CD-RW and DVD-RW became good enough. Eventually those died out too when flash drives became cheap enough. There was a long list of candidates that were supposed to occupy that same space, but they just never became anything. Eventually cloud storage took over and by that it was far to late for any of those dead technologies to even try.
I recall seeing one Nokia phone that actually did have a tiny HDD inside it before flash memory became cheap enough. That could be considered one of the wild technologies that were supposed to take over the market, but never did. Turns out, CF and SD cards were so much better, so they ended up becoming the new standard. Once again, all the wild articles in the tech magazines did’t predict flash memory to dominate the market, because that just wasn’t click bait enough for the editor. Instead, wild quantum crystals and crazy experimental stuff like that was in the headlines all the time. Maybe all the incremental developments in DVDs, HDDs and flash memory just wasn’t sexy enough to write about.
The real reason it takes time is because we try not to harm people even in experimental drug testing. It would be much faster to simply toss shit at the wall and see what sticks, but that's not exactly humane. So we have to find analogues that hopefully mimick humans will enough, but they don't really work well. So it takes lots of time to build up enough evidence with those preliminary tests to convince the safety board to allow human trials. Then trials have to slowly scale up to limit the amount of people harmed by unforseen effects with a lot of time between as the safety board reviews the previous results before allowing the next test.
It's all good to do, but it does make development frustratingly slow sometimes. Especially when people are actively dying waiting for the new drugs.
Graphene is already commercially used in some applications:
There are already very effective cures for some types of cancer (note that the differences between the many types of cancer can be huge and so the effort and time needed to create cures will also be very different. some treatments also are effective but not completely understood yet, like for bladder cancer)
Nuclear fusion devices are commercially used in material analysis (mostly in the semiconductor industry and in ore processing). There are different types in use – some even use thermonuclear fusion on a small scale.
It all seems like super crazy superconductor level tech until it becomes mundane and part of peoples lives … then we stop noticing how amazing it really is.
Oh, I’m not saying that development isn’t happening. I’m just saying that the articles you see on the magazines and papers tends to focus on wild technologies like grinding metals into nano particles and using that as a battery. Yes, New Scientis (or was it Scientific American… can’t remember) actually wrote about that stuff and predicted that cars of the future would use this energy source. Ideas like that get reported bacause they sound cool, while incremental upgrades to plain old lithium ion technology gets ignored by the tech magazines.
I’m really looking forward to seeing graphene and carbon nano tubes being used in various applications. Scaling up your production usually is the real problem though. Even if you’re able to produce a few micrograms of something in the lab doesn’t mean you can actually turn that into a commercial product. The transition from NiMH to Li-ion seemed like that for a while until one manufacgturer (was it Sony or Philips?) took the risk and started making those batteries in massive scale. Consumers loved that, and before long everyone started using this wonderful new technology. When someone takes that risk with graphene, we’ll probably start seeing it everywhere.
It’s a clash between scientists needing to be optimistic about their findings to maintain funding and real people needing it asap. We need to fund more medical research outside of for-profit corporations and increasingly expensive academia
If you’re talking about The Global Fund, they only attack very specific diseases, mostly eradicated in industrialized nations but persist due to poverty (like malaria).
I wonder to what degree anti-western sentiments impact the delivery of certain treatments. Thinking about the distrust I read about after a fake vaccination campaign was used to take out bin Laden, and other distrust and anti-messaging that has to be contended with. It sounds so impossibly frustrating to have the added burden against such basic medicine.
I’m curious how we will ever be advance to the point of being a post-scarcity space faring civilization if we don’t take these sorts of steps because we’re too busy wondering about what might go wrong
I highly doubt we’ll get to a post-scarcity space faring civilization stage. More likely, we’re in the midst of the “self-destruction” part of the Great Filter.
I hear this argument all the time, but the majority of the major research comes from the US [1]. My inclination is that, because the US is for-profit, the cures are developed faster and the science is here. The socialized nations lack, it’s a fact, and it’s certainly not for a lack of resources
TAK-101 is a celiac variant of a (currently paused) MS vaccine. I linked a video on that in my other post that may interest you. The video predates the decision to focus on just one disease. Basically the first iteration of their technology wasn’t effective, but based on the theory that if it works on one autoimmune disease it should work on all of them, they’ve switched their focus to celiac because it’s easier to test the efficacy. Just measure the amount of IL-2 during a gluten exposure. Also it’s cheaper to run one trial than the 5 they had before for various diseases.
The good news is progress is being made on this. But don’t expect it any time soon until you can actually book an appointment to get the procedure.
Thank you. I appreciate you taking the time to respond with more info.
I wasn’t expecting much so no worries and not expecting anything soon. I’ve seen these things for a couple decades now. But this one is interesting. So again thank you.
What phase 2 specifically if you don’t mind sharing? They mention in this article starting with a phase 1 for celiac and then a phase 1 for MS.
I’ve also seen so many of these over a couple decades now. I have RA and MS and often times while hope can be important. As Red said, hope is a dangerous thing and can drive a man insane.
I also have really complicated relationship with hope. Mainly, I try not to hope as my body seems to be insanely problematic. I am disabled with multiple autoimmune diseases and genetic syndrome. While objectively I find the advancement in treatment interesting and amazing, I personally try not to hope. It is absolutely exhausting to get your hopes up only for the other shoe to drop.
Over the years you learn to pick and choose which ones to even read about.
My favorites are when actual new meds are introduced to patients and the majority of the article talks about how much money they expect it to make for the pharmaceutical company.
If there was sufficient funding and enough people on it, we surely could have gotten so much further in so much less time.
Of course you can speed up such developments only up to a certain degree. But given the state of so many important research fields, we’ve surely not scooped out the whole potential.
A few people asked for more information about these trials that I referred to above. In theory if you can cure one autoimmune disease you should be able to use the same method to cure any of them. Obviously we don’t know that for certain and diseases like Diabetes has the extra step of inducing the growth of new beta cells to produce insulin (more on that below)
That said, the three trials I referred to are Celiac specific. I have this and T1D so those are the two I’ve been following most closely, but I definitely dive into news on ms or any of the other autoimmune diseases.
Note: all of these entered phase 2 this year. They are in the EARLY EARLY stages of that phase, so we should see results in 2025/26 for these. I am also ignoring any trial not in phase 2. Also note that several diabetes and ms cures are essentially variants of these, and many of them are running in parallel.
KAN-101: This is from Anokion and happens to have a trial in my area, hence it’s the one I know the most about. This one works by targetting the liver where the relevant immune cells are produced. Even in their phase 1 trial they found that patients had a dose dependent reduction in IL-1 (a cytokine that your body releases in the presence of gluten if you’re celiac). As with all these trials they need to determine what dose is needed to be a full cure and is it permanent?
TAK-101: This is an MS cure that was adapted for celiac disease, originally developed by ImmunisanT. They also have several other variants of this one, including T1D. Unfortunately their website seems to be down. Takeda is handling the clinical trials here and last I heard they’re waiting for the celiac results before pushing forward with the others, but they expect them to move quickly at that point. Here’s a video by one of the researchers behind this.
I should emphasize that there is no guarantee any of these treatments will work and everyone is tired of the latest “breathrough” that we never hear about again. Some of the trails above had to go back to the drawing board after hitting phase 2, TAK-101 is a newer generation of “Nexxvax” which if you google that you’ll find articles about its cancellation.
Then Diabetes has the problem of beta cells needing to be restored or replaced. That’s looking feasible either by transplanting adult cells, stimulating the growth of new ones using stem cells or a similar concept. One proposal hides the beta cells from your immune system entirely inside a scaffold. That last one is more of a new treatment than a cure, but it definitely beats what we have now.
The good news is that work IS being done in this area, progress is being made, and I know at least with KAN-101 they have demonstrated it showing results. The cure is coming. Even if most or all of these trails fails the fact that they’ve seen the results that they have is still really good news.
Thank you for this. I have T1D and it seems like every other day I’m hearing about a new cure for diabetes and other autoimmune diseases. Good to know that this isn’t just more clickbait. Still not getting my hopes up yet but I’ll be interested to see where this goes.
I doubt that people suffering from MS, T1, Crohn’s, Celiac etc would be discouraged by the term. It’s not a prophylactic vaccine intended for the general population.
Lol I know that. I’m saying that there are more people than ever that are immediately wary of anything that is called a vaccine. You’re probably right that the ppl this directly impacts wouldn’t think the government put micro chips in it.
MS, ALS, and Alzheimer’s are probably the diseases I hope they cure the most at some point. Those 3 are just so ruthless and so hard on everyone. Every time I see something like this I’m super excited but I also feel like I’ve been hearing stuff like this for decades now
More work is needed to study Hubbell’s pGal compounds in humans, but initial phase I safety trials have already been carried out in people with celiac disease, an autoimmune disease that is associated with eating wheat, barley, and rye, and phase I safety trials are underway in multiple sclerosis.
It is certainly early, they have not even tested it on animals. Many promising drugs either do not work as believed or have nasty side effects that make them unusable. But we humans have invented many other amazing things. While caution is warranted, just writing it off as impossible is also premature.
Honestly, this is a fair response to an outrageously sensationalist headline. There is promise in this particular style of vaccine, and it deserves further research, but to claim it’s going to cure all these disorders is something so far from the current truth that it really verges on an outright lie.
Yours being in the negative is the whole reason I responded to it, actually. I was hoping my context could make people see that yours was the appropriate stance for those who aren’t hopelessly naive. Sorry it didn’t work!
And surprise surprise, when actual sentences are used to express full ideas and sentiments instead of just sarcasm, it gets accepted better, especially when it’s something that actually matters to folks.
It’s honestly the only response that a headline like that deserves though. And I bet most people thought too, I’m just the one who typed it out and put the target me.
It’s like, the most inoffensive comment ever though, which makes me find the reaction hilariously
Dude, every one of these articles is “This is a breakthrough in cancer research” and then a year goes by and no one has mentioned it since.
Rinse and repeat every few weeks, and then tell me you’re not tired of these stupid ass sensationalized headlines that some dickhead thought hed share for some sweet e-points
Ok? But like… I don’t know how to say this without sounding harsh, but why would I care that you scoffed when you read the headline?
You were expressing your feelings, but that’s all your first post did. Hell, it’s not immediately clear exactly what you disagreed with. Is the science bad? Is the site untrustworthy? Is the article bad? Or is the only problem that the headline is clickbait?
At least if you said “this headline is bullshit”, someone could have either agreed and moved the conversation towards what the headline should have said, or they’d say “no, it sounds crazy but this is actually legit”
The real spoiler is that for easily 4/5 or more of people, it doesn't even matter. Charging happens at home, overnight, or at work during the workday. Multi-hour charge times are irrelevant for these people. Super mega ultra fast charge to 400+ mile ranges are reserved for a minority of people that make regular, long road trips and for people that currently park on the street with zero access to regular charge infrastructure who would be WAY better-served by their city taking bikeped/public transit infrastructure seriously.
Mostly, tech like this exclusively has applications for commercial charge stations designed to be drop-in gas station replacements. We'd nearly all save a lot of money and get better service from not trying to replicate that kind of infrastructure in our future.
But then again, I'm the guy discouraging people from buying any vehicle, EV or otherwise, and instead drive whatever beater they already have right to their MPC meetings to demand better urban design.
Insert some dude who lives way out in the countryside replyguying me with "well actually I drive 700miles round trip every day and you can't speak for me!" here.
Environmentalists paying attention to battery tech have learned too well to not take these kinds of announcements seriously after years and years of no major changes.
I’ve checked the molecule in question, it’s that sort of stuff that even amateurs could make in a backyard lab, from indole and dichloromethane (use AlCl₃ as catalyst). So if the effects are real and there aren’t too big counter-effects, this will spread like wildfire.
It means that it’s relatively easy to turn a bunch of cheap ingredients into the molecule in question. So if the molecule works and doesn’t cause you harm, you can pretty much expect toothpaste manufacturers to include it in their toothpastes. That’s good because toothpastes will be better getting rid of plaque and preventing cavities.
I was hoping more for a to do list for my backyard, so I’ll have the molecule myself and not be beholden to Big Toothpaste.
I’m handy, I got all kinds of tech skills, but I’ve only dabbled in chemistry. I’m not uncapable, just green and rough around the edges. I’ve done a bunch of stuff in the past, like distillations, making sodium silicate (to seal up a forge), anodizing and electroplating, or bleach thru electrolysis. I’ve also used electricity to separate and collect gases. Hell I even took a fridge apart to use it’s old compressor to compress those gasses into different tanks - all in an effort to just not have to buy CO2, nitrogen or argon. Welding with hydrogen is triiiiicky, acetylene is much nicer. I even tried cold welding in a vacuum chamber, lol, but I need a better vacuum pump, probably a rotary one. I’ve made a bunch of different kinds of batteries and super capacitors.
I’ve thought about using calcium carbide to create my own acetylene, cuz I’ve got all the equipment I would need to capture and compress it, but y’know, I like living, and acetylene isn’t THAT expensive. Risk≠reward.
I was hoping more for a to do list for my backyard, so I’ll have the molecule myself and not be beholden to Big Toothpaste.
I do not recommend you to do this in your backyard. And if doing this, just as a curiosity, not as a reliable production method; this is NurdRage tier, not “make bleach at home and avoid Big Tech” tier. That said, on a theoretical level, the synthesis would be simply
add diluted hydrochloric acid (so you can remove the unreacted dichloromethane - the unreacted indole and the produced DIM should go to the aqueous solution)
remove the unreacted dichloromethane
neutralise the solution with some sodium hydroxide. Odds are that the DIM will precipitate first (it’s bulkier and overall less polar), you can use this to separate it from unreacted indole.
You’ll probably get a 10% of junk compounds where the methyl attaches itself to the wrong carbon of the indole. Those could be separated by careful crystallisation.
I’ve thought about using calcium carbide to create my own acetylene, cuz I’ve got all the equipment I would need to capture and compress it, but y’know, I like living, and acetylene isn’t THAT expensive. Risk≠reward.
As long as you take the proper security procedures, this is fairly safe. One of my uncles work with car soldering, and he produces acetylene at home.
Kind of hypocrite of me to say that, given that I have a scar on one of my arms from one of those reactions, but to be fair most people aren’t as stupid as a 14yo mixing calcium carbide and water inside a glass bottle, and closing it. (It was 20 years ago. My family still mentions this.)
That's the cool part about chemistry, when used in this synthesis the dichloromethane becomes a whole new (presumably safe, but we'll see what further testing turns up) molecule. Sodium is explosive and Chlorine is highly corrosive, but combine them and you get regular old table salt. Just because a reagent is dangerous doesn't mean the products it creates will be.
Edit: I just did a little research and it looks like 3,3′-Diindolylmethane (DIM) is safe for human consumption. It's already sold as a dietary supplement. It's marketed to help with metabolism of estrogens but we all know how "trustworthy" the dietary supplement market is.
I don’t think they were implying that DIM is unsafe, but rather saying that they hope people don’t try to handle the dangerous reagent in their backyard.
Just because a reagent is dangerous doesn’t mean the products it creates will be.
I understand that. My concern was with amateur chemists mucking around with the dangerous reagent in their backyards. Imagine them ventilating their lab and killing the neighbours dog, things like that. Or not disposing of wastes appropriately.
By “even amateurs could make” I wanted to highlight how relatively simple of a molecule it is, not that they should. The impact is mostly industrial, those things that “even amateurs could make” tend to be really cheap.
With that in mind CH₂Cl₂ isn’t that big of a deal. It’s a reagent and it needs to be treated with respect and care; just like any other reagent. The worst mistakes don’t even happen with those dangerous chemicals, it’s with the ones that people think that are safe because they get sloppy with them. (Calcium carbide, glacial acetic acid, hydrogen peroxide, this sort of stuff.)
it’s with the ones that amateurs think that are safe because they get sloppy with them.
I changed and highlighted a word that I have concerns about. Keeping in mind, an amateur would have to make sure they correctly purify the end product, and make sure dichloromethane isn’t in the end product.
[DISCLAIMER: I’ll emphasise for the sake of clueless readers that Nobody should this at home. I’m talking on abstract grounds, I just wanted to highlight that DIM is easy to produce thus likely cheap. Plus another poster highlighted that the “magic” product is already industrially produced. OK? Seriously, backyard organics is not like backyard electrolysis, there are 100 ways to die out of it.]
Leftover DCM in the end product is the least concern. Purification is basically “add diluted acid”, keep the aqueous layer, discard/reuse the solvent layer. You could also boil it off to be extra sure, after crystallisation
The actual danger are the vapours, and mostly towards the amateur, not his guinea pig using this stuff. Carcinogenic, volatile, and flammable - if you try this on a Bunsen burner or a kitchen stove you’re risking some explosion, specially if you don’t ventilate this well. Amateurs have that tendency to think “this doesn’t drip on my hand, it’s invisible, so might as well not care that much about it”, and then they get wrecked.
Looks like it’s being already sold for other uses.
That said this is concerning:
Interestingly, neither higher nor lower concentrations showed inhibition, and only 0.5 µM was an effective concentration at retaining apparent anti-biofilm properties against S. mutans.
It could mean that the effect wasn’t really due to DIM or that dosing has to be pretty accurate to have the desired effect.
Yeah, this requirement of a very specific dosage is weird. Usually higher dosage means stronger effect, so it might be something else instead. That’s a shame.
Given how "easy" it is for a civilization to spread throughout a galaxy on a short cosmic timescale, I personally think there are two particularly fertile approaches to searching for technosignatures.
Search our own solar system for Bracewell probes or other signs of very ancient engineering on the long-lived asteroid or lunar surfaces in our own solar system. I consider this unlikely since I don't see why an interstellar civilization that had been present in our galaxy would ever "go away", but if it had existed then they'd have likely left some sort of identifiable junk lying around.
Surveys of distant galaxies and galactic clusters for Kardashev-III technosignatures. Since as I suggest above I see no reason for an interstellar civilization to "go away" that means they'll eventually end up heavily engineering their entire galaxy and others nearby.
Personally I don't think either of these approaches will actually bear fruit, some form of "rare intelligence" seems the most likely solution to the Fermi Paradox to me. But it wouldn't be science if we were sure of the outcome.
Personally I don't think either of these approaches will actually bear fruit
Yeah, I ere on the side of pessimism on us ever contacting another intelligent species. It's fun to still try it, but the math is staggeringly against us. Even with trying to detect radio waves from another solar system, radio waves have their limits on how far away they can be detected before the cosmic background covers them up. The odds of us picking up on radio waves from another planet are... not good.
@readbeanicecream exploding human population a threat to all the mammals, reptiles, birds, fish, oceans, glaciers, crops, forests, and atmosphere on the planet. also to ourselves.
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