The end of Infectious Disease

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Pasteton

Pasteton

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I do think there is a lot of untapped potential for infectious diseases and immunotherapy research, and I think a lot of the missing impetus is a result of many of these disease not majorly impacting most well developed countries. However I don't know about this wide net you're casting with regards to curing cancer. There is certainly a role for immunotherapy in cancer treatments but we are talking about an extremely broad category. Often times the antigens expressed can vary from individual to individual even when talking about a specific cancer subtype, which can severely limit efficacy, and certain types of cancer occur in areas where an immune response can prove more fatal than the cancer itself. So yes there is a role, but cancer is such a broad entity that there is little accurate extrapolation that can be made when comparing effectiveness in treatments from one to the next.
 
Ukerric

Ukerric

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Pasteton said:
I do think there is a lot of untapped potential for infectious diseases and immunotherapy research, and I think a lot of the missing impetus is a result of many of these disease not majorly impacting most well developed countries.
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I'm going to give you an example. Yellow Fever vs Malaria.

Both are tropical diseases, majorly affecting developing and third world nations. Malaria kills 400k people a year, Yellow fever 30k.

We do have a Yellow Fever vaccine, and we've had it since before WW2. We still don't have a Malaria vaccine, despite multiple candidates for one, and a massive cash infusion from Gates foundation.

So to answer the OP, it's not that easy. The immune system is not simple, and the infectious disease aren't simply variants of each other that you can simply categorize, and then produce a handful of vaccine variations that make your body magically immune to all of them.
 
Lendarios

Lendarios

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What about pathogens that affect the body in areas where the immune system can't reach?
 
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