| ▲ | Moderna and Merck say their mRNA cancer vaccine cut death, recurrence by 42%(arstechnica.com) |
| 111 points by _Microft 3 hours ago | 22 comments |
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| ▲ | wrs an hour ago | parent | next [-] |
| Moderna's business model was always to be an on-demand vaccine platform, meaning a cost-effective service for ordering a few doses of a fully custom personalized vaccine. Their infrastructure looks more like a just-in-time 3D printer service than like a traditional vaccine development lab. It was a happy accident that the platform was available when we needed to come up with a COVID vaccine rapidly, and that's what made them a household name (and wildly skewed their revenue mix from plan). But this cancer treatment is the sort of thing they had in mind all along. |
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| ▲ | _Microft 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Related, if you are curious: this is what BioNTech is currently working on. https://www.biontech.com/int/en/home/pipeline-and-products/p... |
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| ▲ | zetazzed 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Amazingly, when this (IMHO quite good) data leaked, Moderna stock took a huge drop: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/article/moderna-sto...
(Seems like people were expecting absolutely incredible, "cure for cancer" results and had already bid up the price a lot in advance.) |
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| ▲ | CamelCaseName an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Not a huge surprise given the absolute face ripping jump MRNA had when the vaccine was first announced. The ~$20B company jumped 174% overnight, and then climbed another 70% over the last two months, now only dropping 18% on this news. To illustrate how much they've gone up, this 18% drop is just slightly less than their entire market cap in June (four months ago) | | |
| ▲ | leoc 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | The usual “buy the rumour, sell the news” then? | |
| ▲ | sneak 11 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | When it clicked that you meant MRNA the ticker symbol, it also just clicked for me that the name Moderna is a play on mRNA. Not sure why I never noticed that before. Like the FedEx logotype arrow, now I will never unsee it. |
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| ▲ | jeffybefffy519 33 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Seems like absolutely huge news, and hopefully getting it approved means it can be developed even more... | |
| ▲ | ortusdux 21 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | I'm way out of my depth on this topic, but my understanding is that studies have shown that several currently approved mRNA vaccines cause a similar reduction in these cancers. Moderna's goal with this trial was to show their tailored vaccine outperformed a COVID vaccine (for example), and my assumption from the stock dip is that smarter people than I were not convinced. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09655-y | | |
| ▲ | bonsai_spool 7 minutes ago | parent [-] | | > Moderna's goal with this trial was to show their tailored vaccine outperformed a COVID vaccine (for example), and my assumption from the stock dip is that smarter people than I were not convinced. The trial result is excellent - anyone ‘not convinced’ was not living in the realm of typical results. Please note this has about nothing whatsoever to do with COVID. It’s probably best not to comment on technical topics if you have no relevant experience. |
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| ▲ | TaupeRanger an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| So the absolute risk of recurrence/death on Keytruda alone was 30%, reduced to 18% with Keytruda plus intismeran. That will definitely make a noticeable difference in this disease if the real world results hold. |
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| ▲ | reilly3000 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I hope this gets through quickly. I have some friends in treatment now and lost my dad to cancer because of cancer medication. |
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| ▲ | pavlov 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The Trump administration and RFK Jr. are actively working to prevent mRNA vaccines from reaching the market. People like Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are actively supporting the administration, including hundreds of millions in donations to MAGA political campaigns in recent months. Should we hold these people accountable for the damage they're indirectly doing to public health? If not, why? |
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| ▲ | soon_to_be_sb an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | >The Trump administration and RFK Jr. are actively working to prevent mRNA vaccines from reaching the market. Why though? Would they get paid by "crakpots" more than they could get paid by Big pharma !? Apparently everyone knows Trump is only interested in him and friends making money. So how do you rationalize your claim? | | | |
| ▲ | poly2it an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | This is a relevant question. Is it ethical to indirectly kill people for profit? If so, under what circumstances? Phrased like this, it sounds ridiculous, but that must imply that the acts being committed are not understood by the people causing them through the lens I am interpreting them. | | |
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| ▲ | londons_explore 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > but held off reporting details until the data could be presented at an upcoming scientific conference If you hold the key to saving a million people's lives, yet you decide to let those million people die so you can take the stage at a prestigious conference, are you a good person? Curing disease is literally a race, with people dying every minute of every day. In any other situation, labs would be running night and weekend shifts and not a second would be lost. |
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| ▲ | estearum 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The data reporting timeline has nothing to do with the approval and deployment timeline. It takes a profoundly naive person to think an organization full of people who have literally dedicated their careers to actually solving these problems are focused on the prestigious conferences. These people signed up for decades and decades of work on a problem that would result in (statistically speaking) guaranteed failure. |
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