Moderna’s promising cancer treatments

Results of a clinical trial “marking a step forward in the developing field of mRNA technology” have sent Moderna’s shares skyward, says James Farrell on Forbes.

The trial of a new Moderna mRNA vaccine found that it “reduces the chance of relapse or death from skin cancer by half when paired with Merck’s immunotherapy drug Keytruda”. The results build on earlier data from the same study, which determined that “the combination of both treatments reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 44% and the chance of spread or death by 65%”.

The results may still need to be confirmed by a finalstage trial, which began this summer, and could take four years, says Gerry Smith on Bloomberg. However, Moderna hopes regulators will ensure the treatment is available to patients as early as 2025.

Meanwhile, Merck and Moderna are testing the combination in other cancers, with a late-stage trial in lung-cancer patients starting recently. The findings will also provide an important boost to Moderna’s post-pandemic strategy of developing new applications for its mRNA technology, pioneered in Covid vaccines, “to fight flu, RSV and cancer”.

This is important given last month’s news that Moderna’s revenue is expected to slide to a level “well below analysts’ expectations” in 2024. Moderna is certainly suffering from the fact that demand for its Covid shots has “fallen dramatically”, says Lex in the Financial Times. The company expects sales of the jabs to drop from $18.4bn in 2022 to just $6bn this year, with a further slide to $4bn expected in 2024.

It’s no wonder that Moderna’s shares have “gone out of favour with investors”, plunging from a price of nearly $500 at their peak in August 2021 to less than $87. But all this could change if further results suggest that “figuring out how to design a vaccine that can teach immune cells how to recognise” and fight a tumour is “the next big thing in the $200bn a year oncology drug market”.