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this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2023
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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.
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
Imagine if there was a global fund for disease cures that all the industrialized nations poured their money and resources into.
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).
Which is silly because eradicating them in some places while leaving them elsewhere just costs more money long term.
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.
Wut?
I can just imagine the opportunities for corruption in such an organization.
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.
Well if that’s the case I wish someone would tell me where the bombs will be landing so I can get it over quickly.
Imagine if the research and development of treatments and vaccines for endemic pathogens and genetic disorders were… you know… socialized
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
It seems like the COViD model worked pretty well. One of these days I’d like to better understand the process, but I believe it was something like ….
Vaccine developed by private companies but with a lot of government funding but more importantly, massive contracts at a fixed price.
Outside of for-profit corporations and outside of academia? So neither the private sector nor the public sector? Who should do medical research then?
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.
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.
mRNA vaccines had been in development for about 20 years prior to 2019. We were lucky.
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.
https://publichealth.jhu.edu/2021/the-long-history-of-mrna-vaccines has a good write-up.
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.
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.
Looking at the price per kWh for commercial batteries tells me that we are seeing the battery revolution right now.
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.
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.
100x more than a CD?
700 MB was the typical capacity of a CD. 100 times 700 MB is 70000 MB, ~70 GB.
SSDs nowadays can hold multiple TB of data, and HDDs can get even bigger in capacity 20 TB HDDs are available for consumers.
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.
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.
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.
TPM502: I know the least about this one, it's from Topas Therapeutics and they recently announced the start of phase 2 trials in Finland, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden. [more]
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.
Again, it's coming. It's just not in a hurry.
Thanking you for the knowledge dump. Always appreciated.
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.
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.
What are the 3 candidates you mentioned?
I'll come back in a few hours when I'm on my computer and give you the list. I'm sure others will be interested in it as well.
I asked for a bit more info as well before I saw this response. Thanks.
I posted more information above in this comment: https://lemm.ee/comment/3624282
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.
I responded to my own comment above with more info, check it out here: https://lemm.ee/comment/3624282
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.