alt Hacker News> 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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For future reference, the preparation for reporting trial data and submission to regulatory agencies typically happens in parallel. Both activities take time and the company is highly motivated for both to happen as quickly as possible.
In practice, data for new cancer treatments is usually published 6-12 months before approval. There are definitely exceptions, especially where the drug is already approved and the data is supporting a new use, but that is not the norm for new drugs.
There are other factors too e.g. it can take time to make commercial drug supply available. In this specific case how Merck/Moderna will scale the boutique manufacturing process for a much larger number of patients while maintaining the speed they need for the treatment to work is a major question.
Again, the company is extremely motivated to do all of this as fast as possible. In addition to the points raised elsewhere in this chain.
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.