Valneva and Pfizer announce Phase 2 study for Lyme disease vaccine candidate

https://www.pfizer.com/news/press-release/press-release-detail/valneva-and-pfizer-announce-initiation-phase-2-study-lyme

by pama • 5 years ago

350 225 5 years ago

pfizer.com

mantas4• 5 years ago

As someone who had Lyme twice.... YES PLEASE.

aixi• 5 years ago

Ever since I moved to the 'first world' I've been scared of this disease. We don't have it where I come from and the long term effects sound straight up terrible.

snemvalts• 5 years ago

It's nothing compared to the other tick disease: tick borne encephalitis. Thankfully there's a vaccine against that

thatcat2• 5 years ago

Though it's not available in the US.

junon2• 5 years ago

Is that the one that makes you deathly allergic to beef or something?

zz8652• 5 years ago

Me too, and with Zika and Covid I feel like I've gone back to the dark ages of diseases.

giantg23• 5 years ago

That's the cost of fast international travel without health screenings or true quarantines.

mantas4• 5 years ago

It's super easy to treat if caught early. But that's where the good ends. Vast majority of cases present the infamous circle. But some don't. And if you got the circle in a hard-to-notice spot, it's easy to miss it (it will a month or two into infection) too.

First precaution is to check your legs (and possibly torso/hands) for ticks after passing through high grass. And whole body after coming from the woods. The nasty bit is you may bring ticks home, they stay active for a while and they may bite someone else.

If you get a rash in a weird spot and you've been out in the woods in the past 48 hours, check it out thoroughly. You may have a tick there. I've had countless ticks hiding in weird places that I found due to weird itchy-rashy feeling.

Once you get the tick, remove it in a safe manner asap. Lyme is transferred after the tick is done feeding and about to take off. Which is ~48 hours.

Personally Lyme Encephalitis is much scarier. Not as common, but long term effects are much more likely and even worse. On the bright side, there's a vaccine for it.

giantg23• 5 years ago

And Lyme nephritis.

d4rkp4ttern• 5 years ago

Should we assume we are safe if we go hiking in a place where we never brushed against any plants or grass or twigs? In other words we went through woods but only stayed on wide open trails. I assume ticks don’t “fly” in the air ?

burntwater• 5 years ago

Mostly good advice, except for the one comment:

Vast majority of cases present the infamous circle. But some don't.

I believe it's actually the other way around, only 20-30% of cases show the "typical" bullseye.

halfmatthalfcat• 5 years ago

Just don't go meandering in backwoods. You're not going to get it in any urban environment.

happyhardcore• 5 years ago

Can anyone give some insight as to why a vaccine hasn't been possible using more traditional technology?

_Microft5• 5 years ago

There was one but it was taken off the market. It's a bit of a sad story because it worked but because of unfounded claims that it had side effects, it lost trust of the public:

"In clinical trials involving more than 10,000 people, the vaccine, called LYMErix, was found to confer protective immunity to Borrelia in 76% of adults and 100% of children with only mild or moderate and transient adverse effects. [...] Subsequently, hundreds of vaccine recipients reported they had developed autoimmune and other side effects. Supported by some advocacy groups, a number of class-action lawsuits were filed against GlaxoSmithKline, alleging the vaccine had caused these health problems. These claims were investigated by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control, which found no connection between the vaccine and the autoimmune complaints.

Despite the lack of evidence that the complaints were caused by the vaccine, sales plummeted and LYMErix was withdrawn from the U.S. market by GlaxoSmithKline in February 2002, in the setting of negative media coverage and fears of vaccine side effects.",

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyme_disease#Vaccination

ad404b8a372f2b99• 5 years ago

Unfounded claims from 100s of people developing imaginary autoimmune disorders? Mind you people are still getting compensated in court for autoimmune disorders arising from the Hep-B vaccine, even though no causal link was found. Just yesterday I had to accompany my sister to the phlebologist, because of severe side-effects from Pfizer, he told us he was seeing troves of patients for similar reasons even though officially no causal-link was established.

At some point you have to wonder if health-policy takes precedence over truthful reporting when it comes to vaccines. (I'm "pro-vax" btw, I was the one who convinced my sister to go take her dose even though she's quite young. Now I feel like a moron.)

rrrrrrrrrrrryan• 5 years ago

The side effects were real and occurred frequently enough to make vaccinating the entire population a net-negative. Lyme disease is still extremely rare in most areas.

What should have happened is the vaccine should've been made prescribable by doctors to patients who live in areas where Lyme disease is common. Despite its side effects, the vaccine would have been hugely beneficial to specific areas of the U.S., but IIRC there wasn't a regulatory pathway at the time for this sort of limited approval based on geography.

giantg23• 5 years ago

It was, and was about 80% effective IIRC. The problem is most tests look for antibodies. So how do you know you're not in the 20%? I believe many people were still beeing treated regardless of the vaccine. I believe the manufacturer also had some legal issues due to adverse events.

stinos• 5 years ago

Pretty much the whole story here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

Thaxll• 5 years ago

Why is it a vaccine? Are there going to be vaccine for everything in the future?

cinntaile2• 5 years ago

Lets hope so, then we can prevent instead of treat :)

meibo• 5 years ago

Vaccines are a very good way to prevent serious disease and may make it possible to eradicate diseases.

The best medical treatment is the one you never have to do.

tboyd472• 5 years ago

A vaccine is a medical treatment.

bregma• 5 years ago

A vaccine is an excellent way to prevent an infectious disease. Borelliosis is an infectious disease. Infectious diseases cause human suffering. Vaccinating against as many infectious diseases as possible will reduce a great deal of human suffering.

I guess the real question is why would you not want to reduce human suffering?

mschuster91• 5 years ago

Are there going to be vaccine for everything in the future?

For a lot of stuff, the answer is probably yes, mRNA based vaccines are a revolutionary game changer - their quick turnaround time means you can actually tailor them to a specific cancer or pathogen the patient has and use the patient's own immune system to fight against the disease. Another advantage of mRNA is that manufacture doesn't depend on chicken eggs which take about six months to produce, are challenging to keep sterile enough and have issues for people with allergies (https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/27/health/chicken-egg-flu-va...).

However, some viruses like HIV or Influenza mutate so much that it was hard to make effective viruses, we will have to wait and see what the future brings there.

mantas4• 5 years ago

Because Lyme disease is hard to catch early. And long-lasting Lyme is damn hard to treat with lots of side effects.

Tycho• 5 years ago

I think thanks to Covid booster shots they realise they can pivot to a Vaccine-as-a-Service model and create all sorts of recurring revenue streams.

cinntaile2• 5 years ago

Not really. They have been working on this Lyme disease vaccine since 2017.

foolinaround2• 5 years ago

Should we have a vaccine for addictions? alcoholism? drug use? eating?

Eg: Give it early in people's lives, that the first time they drink even a little alcohol, it should produce such (non life threatening) symptoms - terrible taste, throw up etc, they would not touch it again, and therefore won't be addicted?

turbinerneiter• 5 years ago

I had all those symptoms when I drank my first beer and still learned to love it. You can overcome everything if you really want to.

twooster• 5 years ago

It's been done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disulfiram

Not as a vaccine, but as a drug.

Ensorceled7• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't there be a vaccine? In Ontario, we give children vaccines for diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, polio, influenza, smallpox (well, I got it as a child), rotavirus, IPD, measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, HPV, Hepatitis B, meningococcal disease.

Ticks carrying Lyme disease are exploding in Ontario, probably because of climate change. It makes sense to get this into the rotation as soon as possible.

After COVID, we suddenly have everybody is acting like vaccines are something weird, odd, new and scary.

detaro2• 5 years ago

anthrax is a standard vaccination, really? that one seems kind of surprising.

CountDrewku5• 5 years ago

Ticks carrying Lyme disease are exploding in Ontario, probably because of climate change.

Do you have proof of this?

triceratops• 5 years ago

Are there going to be vaccine for everything in the future?

We should be so lucky!

tboyd472• 5 years ago

Vaccines are for healthy people, so it's a larger market.

shusaku• 5 years ago

It’s because the human immune system is superb at fighting off disease, so it turns out it’s easier to just prime it than to create our own way to kill viruses.

exhilaration2• 5 years ago

Imagine a vaccine against various cancers!

M2Ys4U2• 5 years ago

Cancer is exactly why we vaccinate against HPV, as it's a huge cause of cervical cancer.

blackbear_• 5 years ago

People have been working on cancer vaccines for a long time actually, it's just so hard.

- https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-cancerbio-...

- https://www.jimmunol.org/content/200/2/443

- https://science.sciencemag.org/content/359/6382/1355

astura3• 5 years ago

No need to imagine, HPV infection causes cervical, vulva, vagina, penis, anus, and oropharynx cancer and we have a vaccine for HPV (that is effective against the majority of the strains of HPV that cause cancer)! According to the CDC "almost all cervical cancer can be prevented by HPV vaccination."

_Microft5• 5 years ago

Prepare to read the headline "mRNA vaccine trial for <...>" a lot in the future. My guess is that they are going to produce mRNA versions of basically any vaccine (and then some) in the future. The nice thing about the technology seems to be that you only need to exchange the mRNA payload while the surrounding delivery method can be reused. That makes it not only a fast method to create a vaccine but a very convenient way as well. Nice side effect might be that for the next pandemic, we might have doses for everyone ready at the moment the trials are done. Take that with a giant grain of salt because I'm not in the industry.

ianhawes2• 5 years ago

The biggest investment that Pfizer made was the creation of a way to reliably manufacture mRNA vaccines. Now they must recoup those investments.

swalsh3• 5 years ago

I think the term you're looking for is capitalize. Pfizer made some investments in a technology that had wide applications, and now they want to capitalize on it. It's good business, and a lot of people are going to be helped in the process.

lampe3• 5 years ago

Can you name any big company that does not work that way? Like Apple, Facebook, Ford, Tesla, Nestle ect ect.

And what would be an alternative?

bildung2• 5 years ago

To my knowledge Pfizer didn't really invest anything, it was the German population who financed Biontech through funds paid with taxes: the lab infrastructure pre-covid (through funded cancer research), the vaccine trials, and mass production (both directly and through pre-purchases before the vaccine existed).

andrea812• 5 years ago

Pfizer... didn't these guys tried unauthorized Trovan on children in Nigeria during a meningitis epidemic?

honksillet• 5 years ago

Does anyone know why they haven't released a Delta varient vaccine? Is seems that it would just involved we changing the mRNA sequence in a computer at the factor, but I'm really just guessing. Also maybe it is considered a whole new vaccineand needs to go through approval again.

phreeza• 5 years ago

Probably because going through another round of certification is harder than using the existing vaccine as a booster, the hope being that this will already significantly improve delta resistance.

inglor_cz5• 5 years ago

Because it means rerunning the trials again.

These requirements will have to be loosened for anti-Covid vaccines. They are tailored to other diseases, but SARS-CoV-2 mutates too fast. The flu vaccine has an exception, too, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to prepare the correct vaccine (against the expected dominant strain) on time.

swalsh3• 5 years ago

I think our approval processes haven't kept up with the technology. The existing vaccine is already approved, and boosters seem to have some beneficial affects.

f6v4• 5 years ago

I’ve read somewhere that they don’t just take a sequence. There’re some tweaks they make to produce effective immune response. CureVac failed to produce a good vaccine for this reason. My take is that mRNA technology is being overhyped, although it’s a massive step up over other approaches.

linuxftw• 5 years ago

There's nothing to update. The mRNA allegedly encodes for the 'spike' protein, which is the infection vector. The theory at the time was that by targeting that protein specifically, if the virus were to mutate, it would loses it's ability to infect because it could no longer successfully bind to the ACE2 receptors.

In practice, the efficacy is a fraction of what the trials stated it was. It didn't lose efficacy due to the delta variant, the manufacturers just lied about the efficacy by cherry picking the data.

The only option they have now is to blame people's immune systems for lack of response, thus the 'boosters' are needed.

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

Trials of the Delta vaccine have started https://fortune.com/2021/08/09/covid-vaccines-delta-variant-...

IIRC these trials should last 3 months

bart_spoon2• 5 years ago

One reason is because they've found that simply boosting with the original mRNA gives a massive spike in protection even against Delta, apparently on par with variant specific versions of the vaccine.

Another is that recent studies are showing that natural infection provides much more comprehensive, long-lasting immunity against all variants than the vaccination does, while vaccination with the current vaccines offers much more immunity than individuals who have never been vaccinated or infected. So it would seem like the best course of action moving forward may be to vaccinate everyone possible initially to prime their immune systems and reduce the severity of the disease, and then allow Covid to run its course. Eventually vaccinated individuals will have break-through infections, gain the more durable natural immunity, and Covid will become a less serious, endemic virus more like the flu or cold.

In short, we don't yet have a need for a Delta variant vaccine. That may not be true eventually, especially for future variants.

zz8652• 5 years ago

HIV was a few days ago. Amazing if it works. https://gizmodo.com/moderna-set-to-test-experimental-hiv-mrn...

_Microft5• 5 years ago

BioNTech is working on a malaria vaccine as well. If this one works out well, it would be a huge win for all mankind.

https://investors.biontech.de/node/10366

amyjess• 5 years ago

At the beginning of the pandemic, people theorized that public health will influence future media for a generation, much like WW2 did. For decades, we got war TV shows, war movies, war comics, etc. Hogan's Heroes ran into the '70s, Sgt. Rock was published until the late '80s, and so on. And I think we're about to see the same with media based on public health efforts.

One of the things that'll come out of this is that mRNA vaccines as miracle wonder drugs that cure everything are going to get huge amounts of attention, and media will reflect that. Especially if the Lyme, Malaria, and HIV vaccines prove successful. We are going to see mRNA vaccines as plot devices and MacGuffins in media for decades to come. It's going to get the same treatment radiation got in the '60s and '70s and genetic engineering got in the '90s and '00s. For example, it wouldn't surprise me if, the next time Marvel decides to make a new adaptation of Spider-Man, the spider will have been treated with mRNA instead of radiation (the original story) or gene therapy ('90s cartoon, '00s movies, maybe others).

cbushko• 5 years ago

So expect the next version of Spiderman to be based on a mRNA spider.

harshreality5• 5 years ago

For example, it wouldn't surprise me if, the next time Marvel decides to make a new adaptation of Spider-Man, the spider will have been treated with mRNA instead of radiation (the original story) or gene therapy ('90s cartoon, '00s movies, maybe others).

mRNA vaccine tech being discussed here is not gene therapy. It cannot (appreciably) alter host DNA the way radiation or gene therapy can. It simply causes the host cells to manufacture desired proteins for a limited amount of time.

nyolfen3• 5 years ago

At the beginning of the pandemic, people theorized that public health will influence future media for a generation, much like WW2 did. For decades, we got war TV shows, war movies, war comics, etc. Hogan's Heroes ran into the '70s, Sgt. Rock was published until the late '80s, and so on. And I think we're about to see the same with media based on public health efforts.

but we actually won that war, which precipitated a rise to global hegemon status. covid has been a pathetic, fumbling showing, one that clearly reflects institutional decay and foreshadows future decline -- the reverse of the first situation

retrac• 5 years ago

Oh, pandemics can certainly have long-lasting social and cultural effects. I ran into something quite interesting just the other day while playing with Google's Ngram on a whim. This is the occurrence of the word "contamination" in contemporary English texts in the last century: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=contamination&... (Care to guess what happened in the early 1980s?)

I'm actually a little worried about this. Of course, I'm happy it'll boost interest in vaccine development. But the terror and fear in reaction to AIDS led to a general biosecurity obsession that became biosecurity paranoia and then hysteria and then a renewal of persecution of homosexual men for a couple decades. Who says we'll be immune to the worse effects of fear, paranoia and panic this time around?

EdwardDiego• 5 years ago

Why would it though?

mRNA vaccines just get your body to produce a particular protein you want to induce an immune response to, instead of injecting the protein directly.

Is it really the slow uptake of mRNA techniques that's prevented an HIV vaccine? Or is it HIV's capacity for rapidly mutating into large numbers of disparate strains inside one person, let alone in the entire community?

I mean, look at the delta variant of Covid, the mRNA vaccines reduce the severity of infection, but do not prevent infection or spreading thereof.

mRNA vaccines will enable rapid iteration, which is good. But they're not a wonder drug at all.

raaaaraaaa12• 5 years ago

that sounds great but its scary technology in wrong hands

supperburg3• 5 years ago

The first vaccine had a problem where it gave people Lyme every once in a while. My hypothesis is that Lyme disease is an autoimmune disease caused by being exposed too acutely in some way, or for too long. For some people, a tick byte isn’t enough exposure to trigger it. For others, the vaccine is enough. They didn’t catch it early in clinical trials because those people are rare enough to not show up in small studies. So by that logic, the same thing should happen here. Maybe this time it will be a small enough group of people to shove under the rug. There’s no medicine in the world that doesn’t harm people in some capacity.

acdha4• 5 years ago

The first vaccine had a problem where it gave people Lyme every once in a while.

Do you have a citation for that? The FDA review didn’t mention that:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

supperburg3• 5 years ago

59 reports of arthritis associated with vaccination

Maybe it was coincidence. I’m just saying if the vaccine gave people Lyme, here’s my hypothesis. But it makes a lot of sense that an autoimmune disease created by exposure to X could be triggered by a vaccine containing X. The definition of a vaccine is to expose a person to whatever it is the immune system recognizes — spike proteins and so on. It’s plausible. But as you point out, not very likely.

timonoko4• 5 years ago

Emphasis should be on tick-bite prevention. I have never had live tick on me and have been literally wallowing on all tick-infested areas on northern hemisphere. They just die. Most probably just drop off, but sometimes there is dead tick only slightly attached. Looks like they die on first drop of blood.

Ensorceled7• 5 years ago

Interestingly, what you described might just be a side effect of tick bite exposure ...

https://www.poughkeepsiejournal.com/story/news/health/lyme-d...

timonoko4• 5 years ago

Emphasis should be on tick-bite prevention. I have never had live tick on me and have been literally wallowing on all tick-infested areas of northern hemisphere. They just die. Most probably just drop off, but sometimes there is dead tick only slightly attached. Looks like they die on first drop of blood.

_Microft5• 5 years ago

People developing immunity to ticks has been reported. We discussed that here half a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28281523

seren2• 5 years ago

This is Phase 2, but I wonder how long Phase 3 will take, given that getting Lyme disease is still pretty rare, can easily be missed or misdiagnosed, it will takes a lot of time and people to get a significant effect between a control group and vaccinated people

pirate787• 5 years ago

Lyme is not rare, the CDC estimates 476,000 cases per year in the US. https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/stats/humancases.html

nverno• 5 years ago

where I used to live in NH signs posted around trailheads said something like 30% of deer ticks were likely carrying Lyme, and that was 5 years ago.

seren2• 5 years ago

Thanks, that is certainly more than I would have expected!

astura3• 5 years ago

Lyme disease is very common on the northeast coast of the United States nowadays. The disease is increasing every year due to a massive increase in deer and mice and is considered a major public health issue.

Since 14 states account for 95% of infections it might seem like a rare disease if you live outside of those 14 states.

matt_the_bass• 5 years ago

Not rare in New England. I’ve contracted it twice since the beginning of covid. And once 23 years ago. The first time I was sick for a year even with treatment. These last two times I caught it early but still suffered for months and my body hurts with changes in the weather.

I wish I’d had the vaccine.

KronisLV• 5 years ago

I actually had Lyme disease when i was younger. Curiously enough, i didn't get the somewhat common rash after the tick bite, but instead it was discovered later, as a part of blood testing. I was submitted to that after my relatives had concerns about how lethargic i was being, as well as because i was experiencing joint pain, which the blood test later seemed to confirm.

If i recall correctly, i was given antibiotics and felt pretty bad for a month onwards, though nowadays i'm not aware of any lingering long term effects, apart from maybe my short term memory being slightly worse than i'd expect it to. Of course, i think that in my case i had it pretty easy, since some other folks are known to develop symptoms that are considerably more worse. Whether there will be any lingering consequences in my future because of it, only time will tell.

A vaccine would definitely be welcome, especially because of how common ticks are here in Eastern Europe - any walk in the forest might end with more than one of them on your clothes. If you have dogs, you'll probably have to remove dozens of those from their fur every summer.

Inhibit• 5 years ago

In a side note I usually read that those rashes are only present in 30% of cases or so. Probably good advice to get checked out if you suspect an infection. Multiple times, if necessary, as the testing also doesn't appear to have a high degree of accuracy.

dejv• 5 years ago

Yeah, got lyme disease one month ago and there was no rashes as well. Good idea is to send the tick to laboratory for testing, it will take quite some time (week or two) but better than nothing.

swalsh3• 5 years ago

Finally, I can be as protected as my dog!

mrfusion• 5 years ago

But lyme is a bacteria, not a virus. So there’s not one obvious protein to have the rna produce. What are they making with the rna?

corin_• 5 years ago

From the article:

VLA15 is the only active Lyme disease vaccine candidate in clinical development today, and covers six serotypes that are prevalent in North America and Europe. This investigational multivalent protein subunit vaccine targets the outer surface protein A (OspA) of Borrelia, an established mechanism of action for a Lyme disease vaccine. OspA is one of the most dominant surface proteins expressed by the bacteria when present in a tick. VLA15 has demonstrated strong immunogenicity and safety data in pre-clinical and clinical studies so far.

snalty• 5 years ago

Previous lyme disease vaccines used a membrane protein, so probably that.

jefflombardjr• 5 years ago

Would this help people who already had the disease? Similar to what is happening with Covid https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/vaccines-long-covid

darkerside10• 5 years ago

I wonder if this might be effective as a treatment for chronic Lyme sufferers as well as a preventative measure.

PragmaticPulp• 5 years ago

Unfortunately it won’t, as Chronic Lyme is most likely lingering damage triggered by the initial infection rather than an actual ongoing infection.

There are some people who believe that chronic Lyme is caused by persistent hidden infections, but you have to cherry-pick a lot of evidence and ignore a lot of contradictory evidence to arrive at that conclusion. Regardless, it seems unlikely that the vaccine would help if the infection had some mechanism to hide from the immune system anyway, as they claim.

darkerside10• 5 years ago

Can you share what kind of evidence is typically cherry picked or ignored in service of that conclusion? Genuinely curious.

If the infection does have that mechanism, would that invalidate the idea that a vaccine would be at all helpful?

M2Ys4U2• 5 years ago

"chronic lyme disease" doesn't exist, so probably not...

darkerside10• 5 years ago

PTLDS then

cblconfederate2• 5 years ago

I assume that mRNA will vaccinate for a lot of diseases, which means that a lot of new viruses will emerge through this evolutionary pressure. It's possible that we are also starting the same race as with antibiotics. Which is still better than people dying from these tiny evil viruses

bxrxdx4• 5 years ago

That's not really how it works, First, vaccines prevent infection in the first place so the virus never has a chance to replicate and mutate, unlike antibiotics which are given after infection and there are a massive number of bacteria and only the most resistant survive. Second, there isn't anything about vaccine acquired immunity thats different from infection acquired immunity, so any evolutionary pressure would already be there.

desine• 5 years ago

First, vaccines prevent infection in the first place so the virus never has a chance to replicate and mutate

Ideally, yes, but in practice people still tend to develop a viral load, their immune system kicks in faster, and the result is a very brief infection.

Second, there isn't anything about vaccine acquired immunity thats different from infection acquired immunity

This is not true with the mRNA vaccines.

jliptzin• 5 years ago

Are there really a lot of viruses lying in wait for current viruses to get out of the way before they can start spreading? I find that hard to believe

darkerside10• 5 years ago

How will they test for efficacy? Lyme is notoriously hard to test for. Are they going to test for antibodies? Because that seems ripe for conflation.

jashephe• 5 years ago

I'm confused. Where does this say the vaccine is mRNA? The Valneva VLA15 website explicitly states "VLA15 is a multivalent recombinant protein vaccine" [1], and the linked press release calls it a "investigational multivalent protein subunit vaccine". Does nobody actually read these things?

See [2], "Subunit Vaccines".

[1] https://valneva.com/research-development/lyme-disease/

[2] https://www.niaid.nih.gov/research/vaccine-types

epistasis2• 5 years ago

You are right. Perhaps people saw "Pfizer" and made some assumptions based on Pfizer's work with the BioNTech mRNA vaccine.

Here, the originator of the vaccine is Valneva, which started their phase 1 trial in 2017:

https://www.newsweek.com/lyme-disease-vaccine-valneva-fda-ap...

ghaff4• 5 years ago

It's not just the OP. I've heard from multiple sources that "Pfizer has an mRNA vaccine for Lyme in clinical trials." Somewhere along the line someone(s) saw Pfizer, vaccine, and put 1 and 1 together and got 3. And it spread. This is the first time I realized that's not true.

ghaff4• 5 years ago

I've heard it described as such but, no, it seems to be a distinct if perhaps somewhat related type of vaccine? (UPDATED: It's not.) The company that actually created the vaccine is also unrelated to the company that developed the vaccine that Pfizer is currently distributing for COVID.

epistasis2• 5 years ago

There is no relation to mRNA vaccine tech, this is a traditional style of protein vaccine.

https://valneva.com/research-development/lyme-disease/

taf2• 5 years ago

Does this have the potential of helping people who already contracted the disease?

t0m4• 5 years ago

Is it really an mRNA vaccine ?

It seems to be a 'multivalent protein subunit vaccine' [0]

[0] https://investors.pfizer.com/investor-news/press-release-det...

andrea812• 5 years ago

Do you have any links to the raw clinical trials data?

foxhop2• 5 years ago

About 8 weeks ago I was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme Disease and I put my story up on YouTube to try to help others, let's just say it's a crazy ride downhill if you neglect the bacterial infection:

https://youtu.be/xbPr7DHwSIw

In the video I talk about the treatment I followed to recover.

Today symptoms appear gone but there have been testimony of hidden, lingering, or reoccurring issues after infection.

All that said, I still do not fully trust mRNA vaccines. Ticks carry a huge array of illness, bacteria and virus besides just BB.

If you are into Permaculture or Solar Punk, my 1/3 acre plot has a mini Food Forest and is a stones throw away from Lyme Connecticut where Lyme Disease was first observed affecting people and children. Like the video if you want to see more.

Elinvynia• 5 years ago

Why don't you fully trust mRNA vaccines?

Gupie• 5 years ago

How effective would such a vaccine need to be? A vaccine of say 70% might be effective enough for herd immunity for a disease that is contagious person to person. But you don't get Lyme disease from other people so herd immunity is not possible, unless the intention is to inoculate deer, (no pun intended).

ghaff4• 5 years ago

As a benchmark, the dengue fever vaccine (Dengvaxia) is about 60-70% effective and is very effective at suppressing the worst symptoms, but may actually put the person being vaccinated under more risk of serious symptoms if they've never had Dengue before and manage to catch it anyway post-vax. Dengue is an unusual disease in that, to simplify somewhat--there are actually 4 strains--catching Dengue a second time can be much more serious than the first time.

Anyway, between the effectiveness, possible side effects, and the aforementioned risk, it's not considered a great vaccine and it's authorized for fairly limited use in the US.

OliverJones• 5 years ago

They can probably recruit plenty of subjects from longtime residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut, USA, and Ipswich, MA, USA, where the disease started to take hold. This is good stuff. I hope they make it through efficacy (Phase 2) and safety (Phase 3) trials with good results.

Valneva and Pfizer announce Phase 2 study for Lyme disease vaccine candidate

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