alt Hacker NewsThe most interesting point of the article for me is that this vaccine appears to be a series of shots which act as a curriculum for the immune system. Each one slightly different and targeting a different stage of B-cell development. I've never thought of vaccine series working like that, so it was a new and impressive idea.
Replies
Well, they kind of all work that way, it's just that most of the curriculum occurs naturally through interactions with wild pathogens
All vaccines are training data for the immune system, which is a learning machine whose operation is a little bit like a genetic algorithm. It generates and sieves variation using a vocabulary of pre-encoded building blocks to fit the targets it's presented with.
It's an incredible system, and a product of probably a billion years of evolution since the first multicellular organisms had to protect themselves from infection.
This is the way a lot of modern cancer vaccines are being developed. The idea is to create custom vaccines in the future targeting the patients specific cancer. So they are therapeutic vaccines. Obviously some cancers cannot be reach by a vaccine or are so aggressive that they overwhelm the patient before they can help.