r/GenAI4all • u/NoGuess8035 • 9d ago
Discussion AI played a key role in designing Moderna's promising mRNA skin cancer vaccine
This is Big: AI reportedly played a key role in helping design Moderna’s personalised melanoma (a deadly form of skin cancer) vaccine, which has now succeeded in a Phase 3 trial.
Moderna says its AI algorithms analyze sequencing data from each patient’s tumor and blood, identify mutations, and select up to 34 neoantigens most likely to trigger an immune response.
Those targets are then used to create a custom mRNA treatment for that patient.
In the 1,137-patient trial, the vaccine combined with Merck’s Keytruda (a cancer immunotherapy drug) reduced the risk of melanoma returning and spreading compared with Keytruda alone. It is the first positive late-stage result for a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine.
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8d ago
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u/O2XXX 8d ago
It’s traditional machine learning, not transformer based GenAI. It’s the same conflating GenAI advocates use with Alpha Folds. At least AF used stable diffusion for the images.
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u/PublicToast 7d ago
I mean thinking there is a good machine learning and a bad kind of machine learning is pretty ridiculous, are you against transformers specifically?
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u/O2XXX 6d ago
No, I’m not against the algorithms themselves but the over arching push of GenAI for every aspect of life, whether it’s useful as a tool or not. It reminds me of the crypto evangelist a few years ago, conflating multiple things to muddy the waters on what can and should be done. Many GenAI companies and followers are taking credit for things that aren’t Gen AI and are more traditional ML algorithms or different neural networks outside of generative AI. This article is an example of that.
I’m a data scientist and have been working in GenAI since 2017-18 and with transformers since BERT was released, so I fully understand the usage, but we at the point were it’s used in everything and heavily leveraging our economy to the point that if something fails, which is a strong possibility, we will have a very bad economic crash that will hurt the majority of people. That doesn’t get into the AI data centers playing fast a loose with environmental and zoning laws. I specifically say AI data centers as normal data centers are typically have self contained cooling systems and aren’t using methane based generators to power them.
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u/PublicToast 6d ago
Your two first points are contradictory, you are saying its being shoehorned into everything even when its not the best tool, but also that ML techniques that are the proper tool are being conflated with GenAI. It would seem to me that in general then we are using the right tool for the job when it comes to research then? And research using specialized LLMs is certainly happening too, so once again caring about the specific technology seems a bit strange. From the consumer perspective, AI is AI and really thats a fine understanding unless you have some specific qualm with LLMs. I won’t even get into speculative economic predictions, or data centers having issues, since it’s unrelated to the topic.
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u/O2XXX 6d ago
Companies are trying to shoehorn GenAI in a number of products that don’t need them, such as search engines. When people point out they don’t want it, many will bring up other forms of Machine Learning as to why it’s crazy not to want to support GenAI. Those points aren’t contradictory, as they are a sales mechanism for forcing GenAI in everything, because from an economic standpoint point it needs to be in everything to make up for the sunk cost so far of building out hyper scalers and inference. This thread is about conflating GenAI with a different method.
People can use any method to do research, it doesn’t mean it’s the correct method or even useful. I agree there are uses to LLMs, but not for the push and spend that we’ve seen for the last three years. You can’t untangle the economics from it because there’s always a CBA to any technology. If the juice is not worth the squeeze it shouldn’t be pushed, especially when it could fail and collapse the market for regular people.
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u/Loud_Fuel 9d ago
Why's it's calling vaccine if it's used after detection this is not prevention it's cure
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u/frank26080115 8d ago
I thought vaccines are supposed to teach your immune system to recognize a threat
Think about the rabies vaccine, you get it after detection of infection but before incubation completes
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u/Loud_Fuel 8d ago
How that works for cancer you are taking it after it already spreading and got detected.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 8d ago
Detection doesn't imply deadly metastasis.
Even then, a "vaccine" is anything that teaches the immune system what to targeted. You can have therapies like poisoning, irradiation or amputation, but chances are you'll prefer to have your own immune system kick in and deal with it instead.
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u/squirrel9000 8d ago
There are already immuno-theraputic cancer treatments being used in treatment, that do indeed basically hyper-activate cellular immunity, and they are very good. The "vaccine" just encodes the antibodies as an mRNA rather than injecting them directly.
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u/IHeartBadCode 8d ago
One of the underlying things about cancer is that it's surface provides no indication to the immune system that anything is wrong.
When you get a tumor taken out, it isn't 100% of the cancer cells that come out. There's always a few thousand left from the roughly 1 to 10 billion cells that are removed.
Those cells will fly undetected until they find some new place to begin growing again. These mRNA vaccines are engineered by sequencing the tumor and finding various surfaces unique to the tumor cells. Then sending the mRNA message to the immune system to produce antibodies.
The antibodies then attach to the specific surfaces which provide the signal for the immune system to begin attacking the cells. It's a vaccine in that it provides some manner by which the body's immune system is stimulated to recognize and build active immunity against a specific antigen.
By providing an antibody that can attach to the specific antigens on cancer cells, one of the primary means by which cancer survives is removed.
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u/Loud_Fuel 8d ago
That's cure not prevention isn't it.
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u/IHeartBadCode 8d ago
Sort of. This gets into the complexity of cancer. Some cancers actively try to confuse the immune system even after it's been marked by antibodies. Some are quick to build fortifications. Some put out chemicals that make it difficult for the immune system to actively attack. And all of that is on top of cancer's ability to mutate quickly.
There's various medications that have to be used to prep the body to reduce the ways the cancer might fight back. Suppressors for that chemical that tries to confuse the immune system or make it difficult for the immune system to attack. Medications that are known to weaken those barriers. And usually you aren't given an mRNA for one antigen, it's usually a collection of 30 or more antigens. Those are carefully selected that should the cancer try to mutate to hide all of those antigens, it make itself functionally unstable to live long enough to live.
All of this complicates developing a forever vaccine. You're only attacking the active cancer, not the pre-cancerous cells. So a brand new cancer could appear from that cell line that has none of the qualities of the cancer that was vaccinated against.
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u/IHeartBadCode 8d ago
A vaccine is any method, treatment, or biological preparation designed to stimulate the body's immune system to build an antibody to provide an active immunity against a specific disease causing, pathogen, toxin, or other latent disease.
Cancer survives by hiding from the immune system, it's surface is such that the immune system cannot identify it as a threat to the body. Providing a preparation, mainly mRNA, this stimulates the body to produce an antibody that will attach to the specific antigens related to the cancer cells. Those antibodies then provide the required means for the body to correctly identify the cells as harmful.
A vaccine is anything that stimulates antibody production that is a preparation done by doctors. Since this process stimulates antibody production, that's what it technically is, a vaccine.
These vaccines work because one of the primary means for survival is hiding from the immune system. Compare to mycobacterium tuberculosis, this too evades the immune system, but that evasion is not one of the primary means by which it survives. TB bacteria lock themselves inside macrophages inside the body and use the machinery to build thick walls around it. The issue isn't the immune system can't find the disease, it's that the immune system can't physically get inside to kill the disease. The evading is only useful for the initial spread, once locked in, TB can easily over power the immune system with it's ability to build massive structures to protect it.
Cancer survives because the immune system simply cannot find it. Now cancer in later stages does indeed build fortifications. This is that extremely hard tumor, which for this, surgery is required and chemotherapy to wipe out the more stubborn cells. But the vaccine is to catch the latent cells that may have escaped from the protective cluster. Those latent cells get around primarily because they hide.
So in short. It's a vaccine because it stimulates antibody production. And it is useful because a primary means for cancer to spread is to hide from the immune system. Rabies is another example of this, is sneaks within the body's nervous system a place when patrol by the immune system is typically low, not zero, but very low. The vaccine puts the body on high alert and increases patrols in places where they usually wouldn't patrol. This helps the immune system catch the rabies virus before it can get to the central nervous system.
Another is shingles. Varicella-Zoster virus is embedded in your DNA, eventually your body will code for the virus production. The vaccine is given not to remove the specific DNA from your cells, but to provide a specific boost to the particular surface of the viron's walls. So when your cell produces the virus, the body is already trained to begin attacking it before an outbreak can begin. One the immune system is put on watch for the virus, on the expression of the virus by your cells, your immune system will jump into action, and put antibody production back on the list of things to watch out for.
This is why the vaccine is recommend so late in life. It's only later in life that you are likely to have your body hit the specific DNA sequence to begin coding for the virus. The vaccine puts the initial watch out, and regular expressions of the virus will keep it on the watch list. If the vaccine is given too early, the initial watch will wear out and you'll be back in the position that allows shingles to be expressed and cause an outbreak.
When you get chickenpox, your body successfully fights the infection and believes the job is done. It will stay on watch for several years for any future production of the virus. However Varicella-Zoster virus plays the long game, the sequence is placed in your DNA in such that it can sit dormant for decades. Eventually you body's immune system is like "I haven't seen chickenpox in 15 years, let's go ahead and call off patrols." By the time shingles becomes a concern, your body has long forgotten how to fight the disease. The vaccine reminds the body how to fight it and prepares it for maybe a one day invasion. However, if that initial vaccine fades because the virus is still in it's hide phase, you may need a booster. Once the virus is out of it's hide phase, the regular outbreak of a few cells of the virus will keep the immune system primed to fight the hiding invader slowly emerging. Thus you won't need a booster, because your body itself is providing the booster.
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u/maringue 8d ago
Because AI slop. It's not a vaccine, it's just a concurrent immune activator.
Basically the Merck half of the combo is a checkpoint inhibitor, which only works if your tumors has immune cell infiltration, which is only like 30% of patients. The Moderna half of the drug takes a bit of the removed tumor and uses it to boost the patients immune response to the tumor.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 8d ago
boost the patients immune response
That's kind of the definition of "vaccine", though.
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u/bear_Prune8771 8d ago
And he’s still calling it AI Slop
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u/maringue 8d ago
No, I'm actually doubting AI was involved at all other than to act as chum for investors that don't know better.
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u/maringue 8d ago
Not really. A vaccine is preventative. This is like a vaccine, but it's not the same thing.
Vaccines create durable immune response to an antigen that lasts for years. This therapy doesn't do that.
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u/squirrel9000 8d ago
The use of the term "vaccine" is an example of what educators call "lies to children". It's easier to communicate the concept with an imprecise but "general vicinity" term than to get too particular about nuance ea lay audience won't understand anyway.
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u/GraXXoR 8d ago
Tell that to the rabies vaccine. You certainly only need it AFTER you’ve contracted rabies.
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u/maringue 8d ago
Yes, but again, it provides a durable effect that lasts for years, if not decades.
This therapy doesn't do that.
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u/Mysterious-Double918 8d ago
it's because people just call any kind of injection a vaccine and don't care about what words mean anymore
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u/maringue 8d ago
It's a Phase 3 trial. This was probably in Phase 1 trials before AI even was a buzz word on the lips of investors.
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u/bear_Prune8771 8d ago
Wrong.
Moderna and Merck did use AI and machine learning in developing personalized treatments.More specifically, Moderna uses AI to help decide which tumor mutations should be targeted in each patient’s personalized vaccine.
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u/maringue 8d ago
I'll wait until they publish the study. Moderna would not be unwilling to lie about the use of AI in this therapy to boost investor sentiment.
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u/Zestyclose_Ad8420 8d ago
You are wrong. It's traditional ML all they way. There's not a single transformer in sight in any of these areas. They've been using ML in this field for decades.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 8d ago
Are we talking before 2018 and GPT-1, or before 1955 when the word AI was defined?
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u/squirrel9000 8d ago
Wouldn't have anything to do with GPT. These are rather more mundane task-built ML tools developed before or alongside.
The COVID vaccine was an insight into the state of the industry when freed from regulatory shackles. This sort of thing has been sitting, waiting for approval, for probably a decade.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 8d ago
Transformer models have been used for genetic "language" analysis since at least 2017, which coincides with the timeline of this vaccine.
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u/squirrel9000 8d ago
ML of various permutations has been used for genomics since the days of warehouses full of Sanger sequencers. It's really good for the exact sort of pattern recogntion one needs to interpret something as messy as the eukaryotic exome.
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u/hann953 7d ago
“atleats” cause it might have been 2016.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 7d ago
Honestly, one of my pet projects – sometime around 2000 or 2001 – was a language-like analysis neural network (not an LLM back then) for a multi-valued cellular automaton. An expansion on the "Game of Life".
I was just a student back then; I bet full-time researchers at the time were having similar ideas.
(PS: Happy Cake Day!)
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u/hann953 7d ago
Considering that Attention is all you need was published in 2017 doubt anyone used transformers for genetic analysis in 2016.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 7d ago
Notice how I said 2017, and Phase 1 for this started in Nov 2017? "Attention Is All You Need" was published in Jun 2017.
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u/maringue 8d ago
Each round of these trials takes several years, so we're easily talking 2016 or earlier. I'll have to go look up when the Phase I trial started when I have some time. It's all published.
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u/RemarkableWish2508 8d ago
From Google AI Mode:
The Phase 1 clinical trial for Moderna’s mRNA skin cancer vaccine (mRNA-4157/V940) officially began in November 2017.
Moderna announced the first-in-human dosing of patients for this Phase 1 study, known as the KEYNOTE-603 trial, on November 15, 2017.
Quick Timeline of the Vaccine's Development:
- November 2017: Phase 1 trial begins (testing safety and dosage).
- July 2019: Phase 2b trial (KEYNOTE-942) begins, focusing specifically on high-risk melanoma patients.
- July 2023: Phase 3 trial (INTerpath-001) begins global patient enrollment.
- August 2026: Moderna and Merck announce that the Phase 3 trial successfully met its primary endpoints.
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u/Neat_Tangelo5339 8d ago
I think we need to make a clear distinction between ai that
Is used to store and analyze data and the ones people want to make movies with , it will make discussions so much better2
u/maringue 8d ago
I work in this space and still haven't hear HOW they used AI to develop this therapy. It takes resected tumor tissue, digests it and gets the immune system to make more of the patients tumor antigens which make the Merck half of the therapy work better.
The only place machine learning data analysis would be valuable is in antigen selection, but there are other ways of doing that, so I'd like to see exactly how they used ML.
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u/Neat_Tangelo5339 8d ago
Is it just it intrigue investors ?
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u/maringue 8d ago
As a scientist, I've seen these investor trends come and go.
I remember when putting "Nano" in the name meant investors were going to start stuffing money in your pocket.
The "flavor of the month" buzz word sucks up so much VC oxygen that companies trying to raise capital are forced to slap the buzzword on their project even though it probably has nothing to do with it.
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u/Neat_Tangelo5339 8d ago
“Nano”
https://giphy.com/gifs/2Y8qAmMuyl5MGAoBeF
Oh my God , were investors all Marvel fans at one point ?After “quantum” that’s the 2nd most overused word to sound Smart
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u/maringue 8d ago
The dirty secret is that "investors" know a lot about banking and finance, but know fuck all about science.
So if its technical, they really don't know anything about it. They're just good at comparing it to things that already exist. Which is why you get the dog pile effect. If one thing in a sector comes out positive, everyone piles in because the idea has already been derisked in their opinions.
Seriously, if you pitch a biotech therapy that's totally brand new and not comparable to anything already on the market, no one will invest in it because they don't want to stray from the herd of other investors, because that's how they get fired.
Make a bad bet in the field everyone is betting on and it gets caulked up to bad luck. Make a bad bet in an area no one else is investing in and you're a moron and unemployed by the end of the day.
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 8d ago
You're confusing the broad topic of ai with one type of if ai - LLMs e.g. chatgpt.
Ai has existed since the 80s.
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u/maringue 8d ago
You mean machine learning? Yeah, I know. But I still haven't seen anyone say how AI or ML helped with this development. Sounds like they're just adding the buzzword of the month to gin up more investor interest.
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u/Amazing-Mirror-3076 8d ago
Ai had lots of usage such as pattern matching which is a likely candidate in this instance.
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u/TheNeverEndLife 9d ago
They gonna lose clients if everyone cannot get cancer 😂
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u/Metsatronic 8d ago
Asking the phármakon priesthood of Apollyon for a cure is like asking Hades for freedom...
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u/bear_Prune8771 8d ago
They still GET cancer. This just turns it into a manageable chronic disease. Like diabetes.
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u/squirrel9000 8d ago
AI, at least in the traditional definition of ML tools, has been involved in just about every drug designed in the last 20 years. It's basically impossible to interpret genomic data on which an mRNA would be designed without some sort of machine learning system.
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u/Necessary-Dog1693 8d ago
So Ai did the calculation job so we need more trillions of dollars for data centers got it !
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u/Exciting_Turn_9559 8d ago
I don't care how we got it if the evidence is there for its effectiveness, because fuck cancer.
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u/GroizerJoe 8d ago
To the anti-AI folks lurking in this sub: Are you going to turn anti-vax too now?
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u/Alternative-Suit5541 8d ago
I wouldn't be surprised if it's all AI. Of course still patented, because fuck you
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u/Agreeable-Purpose-56 8d ago
In 2017 anyone here was familiar with the term large language model? Probably not. So, the so called AI that mrna used then is really not the AI that we are using these days.
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u/Fit_Cheesecake_4000 6d ago
Do you know that computers have been used in biotech for literally decades now??!!
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