How The COVID-19 Vaccine Could Lead To A Cure For Cancer | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by skillshare [Music] and that kids it's how you do a clickbait headline but here's the crazy thing it's actually true i've done a couple of videos on covid since this whole thing started in my last video i kind of played jostradamus and made some predictions we will continue to hobble along until around the end of the year and about that time some vaccines will become available on a limited basis they'll only be going out to certain people i'd say in the first half of 2021 it's going to become more available for people in the higher risk categories i mean i also made a point in a previous video where i was kind of trying to find a silver lining to this whole mess where i made the argument that challenging times often lead to great leaps forward in various fields we become forced to innovate and solve problems that lead to a better world often in ways that we never saw coming well the kovid vaccine is a perfect example of this you know covid hit and it stopped the world in its tracks it's killed millions of people around the world and the race to find a vaccine to covid has become one of the most galvanizing forces in medical history countless billions of dollars in man-hours have been poured into this research and what's come out of it is two first of their kind mrna vaccines the way these vaccines work and the technology behind them have implications that go way beyond covid and could lead to cures for diseases that we've never been able to treat before yeah including cancer okay before we get into all the reasons to be excited about this vaccine let's start with a little harsh reality and that is that this vaccine will not eradicate covid19 experts tend to agree that the virus is pretty much endemic at this point we're going to continue to see outbreaks for the foreseeable future but what it will do is let us get back to our lives and our livelihoods finally i say finally but really the first thing to be impressed with with this vaccine was the speed at which it was produced it usually takes years to develop and test and approve and distribute a vaccine but while we're patting the drug companies in the back for developing this vaccine let's not forget that this was funded by billions of dollars in private money money from people like the bill and melinda gates foundation alibaba founder jack ma and dolly parton who donated a million dollars of her own money toward a vaccine i've said it before and i'll say it again that woman is a treasurer but the specific vaccines i'm talking about in this video are the ones from pfizer with help from the german firm biontech and modern therapeutics who got that dolly money and the reason i'm singling those two out is because they are as moderna's website calls it a new class of vaccine one that manipulates mrna or messenger rna this is the groundbreaking piece of these vaccines [Music] it's also what's freaking people out anytime you talk about altering genetic material anytime genetic editing comes up people's anuses clinch there's a stigma around it i talked about this in a previous video but that stigma is a product of misunderstanding mostly from hollywood movies for the record the covid19 vaccine will not turn you into the toxic avenger and and by the way you could do a lot worse than toxie okay so these drugs present not only an opportunity to contain this particular virus but to also help end the stigma against mrna vaccines and genetic editing in general and that could usher in the dawn of a whole new age the dawn of mass-market genetic medicine before we talk about what makes these mrna vaccines so cool let's just step back a little bit and talk about how traditional vaccines work the first vaccine ever produced in a lab was developed by louis pasteur it was an attenuated form of bacteria that gives cholera to chickens by the way attenuated means weak so in this case a lab assistant had actually left this bacteria out for like a month before he gave it to the chickens and it wound up making the chicken sick but it didn't kill them so vaccines were created and the whole world rejoiced especially the chickens but what really shot pasture to fame was six years later when he saved a child from rabies by injecting him with a vaccine produced in the spinal fluid of infected rabbits since pastor's day attenuated vaccines have been administered to millions of people and eliminated smallpox and reduced polio to a pale shadow of its crippling self hundreds of thousands of lives are saved each year by attenuated vaccines they work by making the body fight a germ that's too weak to actually do any damage and when i say germ i mean both a virus or a bacterium the vaccine is kind of like the immune system's sparring partner you know it figures out how to defeat the weakened version of it so that knows how to fight the real thing when it comes around and by the way sometimes the germ is so weak that the body won't fight it without a little bit of help so sometimes a minor toxin is introduced in there to to make it more efficacious that in the brain controlling microchips of course but you won't find any of that in an mrna vaccine because mrna vaccines work in a totally different way and in the case of covid19 it's all about the spikes this is the tsar cov2virus you've probably seen it over the last year all those spikes that you see around the virus or what gives the virus its name because it kind of looks like a crown kinda but these weird spikes are basically lock picks you know that's what viruses do they're basically home invaders they show up to a door they knock on the door when the homeowner says no they wait until the homeowner looks the other way and then just kind of picks the lock and gets in there are about 26 spike bundles in each virus and each bundle has three spikes in it and these spikes are complicated each can be divided into multiple segments or domains and each of those domains have different functions including what we're talking about here which is to get into a cell the business end of the coronavirus lock pick is called the receptor binding domain or rbd it's a really big deal while other parts of the spike are rigid this part is flexible it can bend and shift and hinge so that it can get into a lock and change its shape on the inside of it once inside the cell the rbd shifts and morphs into a different shape to do different things it becomes a flail to open the lock and a needle to inject the genetic material so yeah if you've been upset that your life has been turned upside down by a stupid virus it might help you feel better to know that the sarge cov2 virus is actually pretty smart it's a freaking transformer this sophisticated spike protein is one of the things that's made covid19 so successful other coronaviruses like sars and merge they might be more deadly but they don't spread nearly as easily as this one does so what's different about these mrna vaccines is instead of teaching the body how to fight the virus as a whole it just teaches the body how to dismantle the spikes basically the mrna makes its way inside your body's cells with the code engineered into it to produce spike proteins this makes the cells pump out spikes into your bloodstream the immune system senses these spikes and goes to work on them figuring out how to dismantle them and then producing antibodies that remember how to attack them in the future then in the future when a big bad coronavirus enters the picture the antibodies go to town on the spikes stripping the virus of its lock picks and preventing it from infecting cells and thus the king loses its crown if you want to be dramatic about it now one thing that's kind of genius about this method is that as we know viruses mutate and the coronavirus has already begun to mutate but by using the mrna transcript to build the entire spike that actually creates a lot of places for the antibodies to attack which makes it harder for the virus to kind of mutate beyond that so in theory if the virus were to mutate to the point to where the vaccine doesn't work anymore then it would also probably mutate to the point to where the spikes can't penetrate the cells meaning the virus doesn't work anymore just to add a couple of details that actually make this even more impressive is that these spikes kind of collapse when they're not attached to the virus so the researchers had to figure out a way to make rigid spikes that can free float around and stand on their own so to do this they encoded instructions into the mrna to substitute an amino acid into it that kind of works as a structural super glue to hold it all together so they figured out not only how to make these spikes but how to modify these spikes so that they behave the way they need to it's brilliant by the way i found this interesting you know we talk about this genetic vaccine as sort of a new technology and it is but technically all vaccines have involved injecting genetic material into people attenuated viruses have a full stack of dna in it and certain types of vaccines actually your body incorporates that dna in order to fight it the chickenpox vaccine works that way and mrna is actually a tiny amount of genetic material when you compare it to a full dna sequence so ironically mrna vaccines inject a lot less genetic material into you than traditional vaccines of course like all scientific achievements this one builds on research that came before it this particular trick was discovered years ago by researchers that were studying hiv mers and respiratory syncytial virus in fact mrna vaccines have been in the work since 1989. this of course got a huge boost recently with discovery of crispr cas9 but until the pandemic this kind of research was considered more not fringe really but definitely not mainstream cutting edge let's go with that today though all that has changed money has flooded into this research and it's being proven out on the widest scale possible which begs the question what else can we do with this which brings us back to my lovely little clickbait headline down there because most of the research that came before the pandemic was into anti-cancer vaccines this is actually what pfizer's partner biontec was known for they had trials going back to 2017 that showed some success with skin cancer and moderna has two ongoing studies working on a personalized cancer vaccine in fact a quick search on clinicaltrials.gov shows 40 active studies showing an mrna vaccine in countries around the world eliminating vaccine from the search yields hundreds of studies in the results list and the basic idea behind a cancer vaccine is kind of the same as the covid vaccine it trains the body to attack cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone modernist research focuses on something called neoantigens these are proteins that sit on the outside of cancer cells and they can use those as markers for the immune system to attack them a very simplistic explanation would go something like this doctors take a biopsy of a tumor sequence the dna and rna to determine the specific neoantigens associated with that cancer then engineer mrna that's encoded for t cell receptors specific to that neoantigen causing your body to pump out t cells that attack and kill only those cancer cells at least they should modernist candidates shrank tumors in the head and the neck but not in colorectal cancer cases now why it works better against some cancers is still being investigated one of the theories involves the different selections of neoantigens available okay so this gets a little bit in the weeds and i barely understand it myself but it leads somewhere important so just just bear with me for a second so moderna like i said before they they sequence a tumor's dna and then they look to see what kind of proteins that dna would produce looking specifically for those neoantigens but not all the proteins that the tumor will create will be neoantigens in order for them to be the kind of neoantigens that we can use some mutations have to occur if you want to know why so many clinical trials are focused on melanoma or esophageal cancer just look at this chart it shows the rate of mutation across different cancers one megabase is one million base pairs so thyroid cancer for instance produces about one mutation per two million pairs while melanoma produces something like 20 mutations per million more mutations means more chances that a protein will be a neoantigen as you can see on the right side of the chart but hang on a second because according to the chart colorectal cancer is more prone to mutation than head and neck cancer and yet modernist vaccine worked on the head and neck cancers but not on the colorectal cancer so there's clearly something else going on here this problem of identifying neoantigens has become the big question for mrna researchers and just this last year a team was put together to try to find the answer to this and the name of this group i'm not making this up is tesla which stands for the tumor neo-antigen selection alliance oh come on you guys are totally cheating on that one in october 2020 they published a landmark report it pointed out characteristics of highly immunogenic epitopes which are proteins that the body doesn't like that should make neo-antigens easier to identify in the future say what you want about the acronym but the doctors at tesla are doing important work how long will it take for their work to bear fruit well in modernist trial five out of the ten patients saw their tumors shrink two of them went away completely of the remaining five patients all but one remained stable throughout the trial and by stable i mean their tumors didn't grow anymore which is obviously a good thing the results were so striking that moderna has decided to expand this trial out to more people so yeah we're close we are closer than we have ever been to a cancer cure but the promise of mrna interventions don't stop there as i mentioned before there's tests going on for mrna vaccines to hiv but other viruses as well including zika and rabies louis pasteur will be proud but these are all vaccines you know ways to train the body to fight off a pathogen but mrna has more tricks up his molecular sleeves because we can code mrna to produce any kind of protein or enzyme that the body might be missing so this could also be beneficial for people with enzyme deficiencies moderna has a trial in its early stages to treat children with propionic acidemia yeah i hadn't heard of it either but pa prevents people from breaking down certain acids in their bodies which can lead to things like brain damage kidney damage anemia and risk of stroke and most of the people who have it are children it's rare but it sucks so a treatment for it would be awesome one of the most exciting applications for mrna technology can be a potential cure for diabetes in people with type 2 diabetes the production of insulin is impaired in the pancreas islet cells an mrna treatment might code those cells to build new production machinery more than 30 million people have type 2 diabetes in the u.s alone the effect of a diabetes vaccine would be immeasurable and yet we are still just scratching the surface of what this new technology can do this is what i was talking about before this pandemic may usher in a whole new era of medicine that will be taken advantage of i mean from this point forward but beyond that one of the most interesting things about this pandemic was the surge in medical school applications you know a lot of people had their lives turned upside down because of this pandemic and they want to get into the medical field to see if they can prevent the next one from happening i mean think of all the brilliant new minds that will now be working on medical problems moving forward that maybe would have done something else you know it's it's it's kind of mind-boggling to think about how positive an effect that could be the cove changed a lot about how we interact with each other and how we work with each other and that brings up opportunities in all kinds of fields now is actually a great time to go for your dream career whatever that might be and if you need a little help in that department i can highly recommend the class creating your dream career uncover and apply your creative strengths on skillshare taught by learning and talent development strategist holly m coley murchison this class will help you break down your experiences influences and strengths so they can become the building blocks to a more meaningful career this class will help you discover the strengths you didn't even know were there and hone those into a career that makes you feel fulfilled inspired and full of purpose whether you're a creative an entrepreneur or just somebody who wants to get more out of their career this quick course will give you a plan of action to do exactly that this of course is just one of hundreds of courses you can take on skillshare covering all kinds of subjects like photography but also photo editing film and video production graphic design music as well as productivity courses and business classes skillshare's online classes are super affordable at only ten dollars per month but the first thousand people to sign up with my link below get a free trial of skillshare premium for a limited time so shake things up try something new links down in the description big thanks to skillshare for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon and the channel members who are helping to keep the lights on around here and help me to build a team and just forming an awesome community i want to shout out some patreon people real quick and murder their names we got ashle richard hammond justin german andrew rose derek freeze rich fuller tristan mclaughlin david hoagy uh chris carter phillip elgers gazeta poppety and austin carl sort of did okay there uh thank you guys so much if you would like to join them get early access to videos and exclusive content and live streams you can go to patreon.com answerswithjoe please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video because google thinks you'll like it or any of the others down the little sidebar below have my face on it and if you like them and you want to see more i do invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 421,311

Rating: 4.9003029 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, COVID-19, cancer, mRNA, genetic editing, diabetes, pfizer, moderna, mRNA vaccine, louis pasteur

Id: UOz-w4QqF4o

Length: 15min 49sec (949 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Lausannea]

Shows graphs of how type 1 works and applies that to type 2 without acknowledging insulin resistance. Sounds like they don't really know what they're talking about.

[u/n00bsack]

Is it just me, or does he not know the difference between T1 and T2?