SCIENZZZZ

Godfather of mRNA vaccines: We're working on vaccinating people against cancer.

I mean... I guess I was really excited about this possibility before the covid non-vaccine...

The pioneer behind mRNA vaccines has revealed plans for a new vaccine that immunizes against cancer more than a decade before it strikes.

Dr Drew Weissman won the Nobel Prize this year for their discovery of a way to inject genetic instructions to induce an immune response against Covid, a discovery that helped save millions of lives and bring the world out of the pandemic.

But... did... it...?

Now, he is leveraging that discovery to create an mRNA vaccine against another of the world's biggest killers - cancer.

The vaccines in development at the University of Pennsylvania, where Dr Weissman conducts his research, teach the body how to recognize tumor cells and fight them when they form.

The vaccines are geared towards people with genetic mutations that raise their risk of cancer, such as the BRCA gene that influences breast cancer risk.

At this point in the article I was thinking exactly this: given the history of this vaccine, which I am totally not allowed to say has caused widespread vaccine injury and heart inflammation, I would only consider such an mRNA shot if I had the genetic markers making me a risk for a specific cancer.

Dr Weissman said at the Nobel Prize lecture on medicine: 'The idea here is that you treat people before they develop cancer... and maybe completely prevent cancer from ever appearing in these patients.'

Maybe.

With the covid-19 shot we had a guarantee, and that turned out not so hot.

...

Dr Weissman and fellow researchers at UPenn set out to find a way to enhance the power of an mRNA vaccine by encoding it with genetic instructions for the body to produce a specific subset of immune cells that kill off cancer cells.

Within that set of genetic instructions injected into mice to produce an antibody response, the researchers included mRNA teaching the body to produce a protein called IL-12, which plays a crucial role as a messenger that facilitate communication between cells.

IL-12 directs the body to generate a specific type of immune cells called effector T cells, which Dr Weissman said could effectively clear out cancer from the body and even prevent it from occurring in people who are at highest genetic risk.

He said: 'We know that it's five or 10 years that cancer cells first start to appear before you've got full-fledged large tumors that impair function.

'If we treat these people maybe every five years with a vaccine that only makes effector T cells, we'll clean out, clear away, kill all of the transformed cells.'

I guess I'd try it, if I knew I was a high risk for a specific cancer. And if they did testing on more than 12 fucking mice.

Good news for asthmatics: new antibody treatment controls 92% of severe asthma cases.

Safer relief for people suffering from severe asthma is a step closer with a large clinical trial finding a monocolonal antibody treatment called benralizumab can radically reduce the need for more dangerous high-dose steroid treatments.

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The treatment investigated in a phase four clinical trial funded by its producer AstraZeneca, works in a far more targeted way. Benralizumab is a protein antibody that reduces the number of inflammation-causing immune cells called eosinophils, which are produced in abnormal amounts in severe asthma cases.

Benralizumab has been so effective that in the trial of over 200 patients across Europe an incredible 92 percent of them safely reduced the use of inhaled steroids, with more than 60 percent no longer needing them at all.

Almost 90 percent of patients in the steroid reduction group remained exacerbation-free by the end of the trial.

Science says Cat Lady Syndrome is all too real.

A new review suggests that having a cat as a pet could potentially double a person's risk of schizophrenia-related disorders.

Australian researchers conducted an analysis of 17 studies published during the last 44 years, from 11 countries including the US and the UK.

"We found an association between broadly defined cat ownership and increased odds of developing schizophrenia-related disorders," writes psychiatrist John McGrath and fellow researchers, all from the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research.

Is it the cat ownership causing the schizophrenia, or is it the schizophrenia causing the cat hoarding?

This "science" advances nothing!

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"After adjusting for covariates, we found that individuals exposed to cats had approximately twice the odds of developing schizophrenia," the team writes.

This study is both worrying but also actionable -- losing just a little deep sleep after age 60 significantly increases the chances of dementia. While that's alarming, it also suggests a way to reduce one's risks of dementia.

A decrease of 1% in deep sleep each year for individuals aged 60 and older corresponds to a 27% higher risk of developing dementia.

A study has found that every 1% decrease in deep sleep annually in individuals over 60 years old is associated with a 27% higher risk of dementia. This research indicates that improving or preserving deep sleep, known as slow-wave sleep, in later life may help prevent dementia.

I've been wearing a Fitbit for years so I know about how much deep sleep I get. I know when I get 40 minutes or less my mind is fried and I feel like crap, when I get an hour I feel eh, when I get an hour and 15 minutes I feel normal, and if I can get 1 hour and 30 minutes or more I feel really good.

There is some placebo effect going on there because when I see a good score I definitely feel good just because of the score, but it's definitely true that deep sleep is very restful and restorative sleep.

It comes earlier in the night. They say it comes between 10 pm and 2am and I never got an answer: What if you're a nightowl? Does it shift later for you? Or is it just that people who go to bed early just get more deep sleep than nightowls?

I don't know the answer but I do tend to get more deep sleep the earlier I got to bed.

So -- tell me about your GAINZZZ, or any PLANZZZ to get some GAINZZZ in the new year.

I've got mild slow GAINZZZ. I'm semi-fasting to drop the weight I gained over a couple of slack months. Imma start eating again, and working out, around Christmas.

Want to hear my downfall? I was eating Kirkland bratwursts from Costco. Those weren't the problem. Those were delicious. I was making them with onions and pepper. Fantastic.

Cannot recommend those bad boys enough. Three and a half pounds for $15. Except they seem to have stopped selling them a month ago.

Who knows, possibly because of Biden's inflation. Maybe they can't sell them at a profit any longer.

I got the bright idea that I could have those with low carb buns from Hero Bread.

I mean, the buns are low carb, right? It says so on the package!

Well, I was having those bratwursts a lot because they're cheap and easy to make and also because they're low-carb and I'm on a low-carb diet.

And then in two months I noticed -- say, these pants. They've shrunk.

Wait -- these pants have shrunk too.

Wait, so have all of these underwear.

Is there something wrong with the water in my washing machine? It's shrinking all my clothes!

Well, I began to suspect that Hero Bread might not be the Keto hero I thought it was. Thins guy, Serious Keto, measures the blood sugar impact of various products claimed to be low carb and he found it to be the cause the second biggest blood glucose spike of the various low carb breads he's tried.

The bread might be lower carb than other breads, and might be okay as a treat when someone really wants to have a hamburger with a bun or a sausage sandwich, but it cannot be had frequently, and certainly not daily, if you're trying to stay keto.

Otherwise your clothes will shrink.

Not to knock Hero bread too much -- I was having it every day and that was stupid. I was living in a fool's paradise, I was.

And Individual User Error was certainly a big part of the problem.

He reviews all of these "low carb" breads. It looks like... they're all akshually pretty high carb. Carbonaut seems to be okay.

I went through this before -- any longtime low-carbers might remember the Dreamfields debacle. Dreamfields claimed to make a pasta in which the carbohydrates were somehow... "protected" by some kind biological sheath which kept them from being digested. It tasted just like delicious pasta -- but the carbs would pass right through your system completely undigested, because, see, the carbs were wrapped in this Magical Carbohydrated Micro-Barrier.

We believed -- because we wanted to believe.

Until a couple of months went by, and, what's going on? My pants have all shrunk.

There's just no way to get around the sad fact that a low-carb diet means "low carb." I keep wanting a loophole, but there is none.

I tell ya, when I stop this semi-fast, I'll still have weight to lose, and I think I'm going to try the protein-sparing semi-fast for four weeks or six weeks. Simple idea, you can eat only protein -- you have to have multivitamin every day too, plus electrolytes -- and can only have 800 calories.

Which may not sound like a lot but, eh, I can get by on 400-500. And all that protein is filling. You'd be surprised. When all you eat is protein, hunger may not be a problem: Getting sick of the sameness of eating protein every meal will be the problem.

By keeping calories low but eating nothing but protein, the diet is supposed to spare all the muscle on your body from being consumed for energy. So it's actually muscle-sparing.

People lose 30 pounds of fat in six weeks. It's an actual medical protocol.

Maybe a New Years Moron Plan?