STAT+: Inside Moderna and Merck’s cancer vaccine triumph

At an off-site leadership meeting held by Moderna in March 2023 — after mid-stage results of the biotech company’s cancer vaccine showed promise — CEO Stéphane Bancel had the floor. He asked if any of the 100 or so executives present had expected the experimental treatment to succeed. If they did, he said, please stand up.

Stephen Hoge, Moderna’s president, was standing on stage. He sat down. Then, Hoge recalled in an interview with STAT, Bancel sat down, too.

“None of us believed it,” Hoge said. It had taken time before he remembers feeling, “Oh my gosh. This is real.”

The rest of the world remained skeptical until last Wednesday, when Moderna and Merck revealed that a 1,137-volunteer study had shown the vaccine reduced the odds that melanoma that had been surgically removed would return or spread. Up to that point, investors were betting against Moderna’s stock. Even after the news, some observers argue researchers should wait for fuller data — while longtime skeptics of Moderna’s core mRNA technology do the same.

Top-line results from large pharmaceutical firms are rarely reversed when full data emerge, but doubt is nothing new for Moderna’s cancer treatment, called intismeran autogene. It has always been the breakthrough no one quite believed in.

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