Moderna and Merck say their mRNA cancer vaccine cut death, recurrence by 42%

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.

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?

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.)

Related, if you are curious: this is what BioNTech is currently working on.

https://www.biontech.com/int/en/home/pipeline-and-products/p...

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.

I hope this gets through quickly. I have some friends in treatment now and lost my dad to cancer because of cancer medication.

> 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.