- Moderna's cancer vaccine lowered the risk of death or skin-cancer recurrence in a midstage study.
- Analysts say the vaccine's long-term success still needs to be proven.
The biotech company Moderna just announced a significant advance in its efforts to treat cancer.
Moderna said Tuesday its personalized cancer-vaccine program succeeded in a midstage study of skin-cancer patients, affirming that its messenger RNA technology can be a game changer beyond COVID-19 vaccines. Investors were delighted by the news, sending Moderna's stock price up 21% by midday Tuesday.
The recent study treated 157 patients with serious cases of melanoma, a common type of skin cancer. The patients had surgery to remove their cancer and then received treatment with either just Merck's cancer drug Keytruda, the current standard of care, or Keytruda and Moderna's vaccine. Moderna designed each vaccine to the unique DNA of each person's tumor through a largely automated laboratory process. The group that got Moderna's vaccine had a 44% reduction in the rate of cancer recurrence and death compared to the trial participants who just got Keytruda.
The Cambridge, Massachusetts-based biotech vaulted to prominence in 2020 by developing one of the first coronavirus vaccines using its mRNA technology. The coronavirus vaccine was the first approved product for Moderna, which was founded in 2010. Moderna's CEO Stéphane Bancel compared the cancer study results to the initial outbreak of COVID-19, when Moderna scrambled to respond and develop a vaccine.
"It's, for me, a COVID-like moment going back to January 2020," he said to Insider. "It's the same thing for me. The enemy now is cancer. We know the technology works."
Moderna's CEO sees a bright future for cancer vaccines
Bancel said Moderna's mRNA approach is the key to its success. Moderna uses mRNA to get inside immune cells and instruct those cells to produce particular proteins that can help fight that person's cancer. Bancel said he sees massive potential for this approach, with a market that could surpass its coronavirus vaccine.
"This could be as big as Keytruda or bigger," he added, referencing Merck's blockbuster cancer therapy that brought in $15.5 billion in sales through the first nine months of 2022.
"Now we are an oncology company," Bancel said, "and we might be one of the biggest oncology companies down the road."
Bancel said Moderna and its partner, Merck, would launch multiple late-stage studies in 2023 to test the cancer vaccine in not just melanoma patients but other types of cancer. Merck paid $250 million earlier this year to jointly develop Moderna's vaccine, extending a partnership between the two drugmakers that began in 2016.
But these trials will likely take years to finish, Bancel acknowledged, meaning potential FDA approval and commercial launch won't happen in the near future.
Analysts are excited but cautious about the vaccine's long-term success
Daina Graybosch, an SVB Securities analyst who covers Merck, said in a Tuesday note that the results exceeded her expectations, but she wants to see more detailed results than what was provided in Moderna and Merck's press release. Study results have yet to be presented at a conference or published in a journal. Graybosch cautioned that other experimental cancer drugs showed promise in Phase 2 studies only to disappoint in Phase 3.
Brad Loncar, a biotech investor who runs an exchange-traded fund tracking immuno-oncology companies, told Insider that Moderna made a good decision in focusing on a narrower patient group who had surgery to remove their cancer first. But Loncar added other types of cancer are harder to treat than melanoma, which he called a "low-hanging fruit" for immunotherapies.
"The fact it succeeded in melanoma is definitely not a guarantee that it will succeed in other cancers," Loncar said.