Benefits, caveats, and the cytokine-storm risk

1:56:06crap is coming their way. This is it generalizes vaccines in a way where you can have a inventory and stockpile of this generic Again, this is this is an early stage. Very early only in mice. caveat caveat caveat And I'm going to get into the caveats later, but I still think it's It's because it it it Clearly there's mechanisms that mean that this makes sense. >> Yes, yes, exactly. That's the big thing, right? Clearly it worked in mice, which means that we're just mammals. Like maybe this might not work, but the it's a paradigm shift, I think, in how we

1:56:47think about vaccines in general and the idea of priming our immune system in an early way. I mean, it makes total sense. Like if I mean, this is maybe a a bad a bad Like, if you're if you're going to do if your body is about to go through trauma, Yeah. like let's say you're going to run a marathon, you're going to train before the marathon. And and and this is sort of a a means by which for us to arbitrarily activate the immune system because it has the capability to go back to what we said before. It has the capability to deal with the problem, but it doesn't necessarily have enough of a a running start

1:57:28to deal with that time gap problem we talked about earlier. Yeah. Um and if we just give it an extra little bit of a head start, its natural response will like will be better at taking care of the situation. >> Exactly, yeah. And I mean, there's there's caveats, right? Like, I think the researchers when we when they go into human trials, they need to make sure that it doesn't cause these things called cytokine storms, which is this auto-inflammation where the the immune system just attacks the body itself, right? Gets confused. I can imagine there's some problems here, right? Where you're like you've basically just put the immune system in your lung on high alert. I mean, one would one would make the analogy that if you have a nation with a

1:58:10border and then you create an overzealous uh like police force to respond to that, >> Right. >> you might start ending up shooting people inside the border >> Right, right. >> when you're focused on people who are coming from outside >> border. Yes. >> So, as an analogy, >> of course. we we do not want to have an overzealous uh immune system cuz we don't want to start shooting our own people. >> Yes, because that would be Everyone agrees that's bad, right? >> we don't want our body to die. >> We don't want our own cells to get affected. We want to get the threat. Yes. Yeah. So, so that's that's that's something that's an issue, right?

1:58:50>> Yeah, totally. Cytokine storms, also known as Nice. Well, I'm going to put this on Instagram because apparently >> Yeah, apparently people got very People got very Yeah. about a joke, guys. Anyways, but that's that's one of the that's one of the um you know, caveats of these. Like, the immune system is notoriously finicky. Right. So, we we don't know. But, at the end of the day, I think it's a lot of very cool fundamental research that's happening. >> Um I think it'll be very very interesting to see where this leads. This this this was a you said I that I was going to like the vaccine story. >> I I think it's it's very cool. >> I I tend to and and apologies for those who sometimes feel like we're getting a

1:59:31little too deep. I tend to like the stories that have a really keen fundamental insight >> Yeah. about something that was non-obvious and required a little bit of creativity or outside-of-the-box thinking to problem-solve from an experimental design and solution perspective. So, that one was quite nice. >> Yeah. That one was quite nice. We started off really far away and then we ended up really really close to home. >> to home. Uh our first story was our astrobiology story out of PNAS Nexus Johns Hopkins University. This was on our idea of understanding panspermia and the three aspects that

2:00:15are necessary in order for something to an organism that's life on one rock to make it to another rock. One and half of those threes of was already kind of solved. But, this was a new one that's now solved, which is the initial departure from Getting off the planet, yeah. on high impact. We ended with this immunology story about the one vaccine to rule them all in a different approach. Instead of going after a pathogen specifically, can we prime the pump in the immune system to just have a better more generalized response with some interesting dynamics of understanding how adaptive and innate immune cells communicate with each other. >> Yeah. Um on the battlefield. Several

2:00:57good rundown stories. If you've made it to the end, you are very special cuz you get to get a prompt for uh comment of the day. I want to call out uh I'm going to pull this up real time here cuz I didn't do so earlier. I want to call out one of the previous comments Oh, yeah. from last week's episode which uh I think there were two that were quite that were one at least was quite good. Uh the second one might be okay. And I think this one came right before we started recording. And so please bear with me. Okay. Yes. So So 2 days ago, this was for our last episode. We asked for uh come up with a better acronym for G-

2:01:38GPLD1. Um and so one of them was garlic pepper lemon dip um because apparently we made someone hungry. Um so garlic pepper lemon dip sounds actually quite nice. And then we had another one earlier today which I guess may have been on YouTube because I'm not seeing it here. And so this is now bad and a bad plug and I don't have it pulled up. Let me pull up YouTube really quick. If you listen this long, you're in it for the long haul. >> You're Yeah, you're in it. Just just keep listening. Whatever. >> give us a second here. This is bad pre-production prep by me. So but I want to make sure people get their just desserts here on some of these really clever uh

2:02:19references. And nope, I don't see the one the second one. >> So I failed on it. But what should we have for the comment this time? >> Um This This was a good >> Panspermia. Yeah, a different definition for panspermia. >> Yeah. That's what exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. >> that one. >> What do you guys think? Panspermia. Give me another definition. >> I like that one. That is quite good. I'm your host >> Yeah, please. Please. 13. PG-13. >> 13. Kids can go to PG-13. It's not that bad. >> not that bad. Um I'm your host Lester Nare, joined as always by my co-host and our resident PhD Krishna Choudhury. I'll make one

2:03:01last reference. He's wearing a SpongeBob t-shirt today. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you've heard of this music artist called Glorb, g l o r b. So, he took AI to voice all of the characters in SpongeBob and then dropped some of the craziest wrath rap beef tracks like two or three years ago, where it's like SpongeBob and Patrick and Sandy and Mr. Krabs and Plankton voices are rapping on trap beats. And I'm not going to lie, I was actually listening to some of his tracks earlier today on the way home. You need to send me some. It's It's This is not >> English on SpongeBob. The The This music is not PG-13.

2:03:44So, parents do not It's not PG-13, but it is the the voice um duplication is incredible. Well, And there's like a beef between the Chum Bucket and the Oh, yeah. That's right. That's right. And Krusty Krab, okay. This is no longer about science, so we will sign off here. We will see you all next week. This is from First Principles.