Oh yeah it's very exciting. In 2024 a vaccine that targeted glioblastoma, an especially nasty brain cancer with an almost zero survival rate. The vaccine mimics certain aspects of tumor cells, triggering a fast, vigorous immune response that attacks the actual tumor. Encouraged by the results, they've somehow generalized the vaccine over the past year to stimulate an immune response to cancer cells in general. Immunological therapy is totally different from chemo or radiation, and a generalized approach is vastly different from what the whole field has been doing for decades. Very promising.

1, 2, 3, 98 99 100 here I go!

Hey, found you! And yes, I can time and space travel to this comment out of this one https://lemmy.world/comment/18397250

It's mRNA based, if I recall.

This makes it, essentially, endlessly flexible. We can now take a sample, sequence it, find the mutations, simulate what the protein looks like when folded, generate* the correct complimentary protein for that target and write the actual amino acid sequence directly into mRNA and give it to the patient.

This is currently incredibly expensive because it's being done manually by labs full of PhDs. But every part of this process is being rapidly improved and made cheaper.

mRNA based medicines have amazing promise. For example they had the COVID vaccine designed less than 12 hours after sequencing the virus.

*using a diffusion model, like AI image generators but they produce amino acid sequences that generate arbitrarily shaped proteins

Thanks, I had hope for a few seconds.