Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel thinks investors are wrong about the company’s cancer vaccine.
Moderna’s stock fell sharply over the past few days after data emerged about its cancer vaccine that investors found disappointing, though researchers called it breakthrough.
Bancel laid out his thoughts in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Melanoma data
Bancel said the vaccine, known as intismeran, delivered a similar-size benefit in melanoma that started Keytruda, Merck’s immunotherapy, on its road to becoming a blockbuster
Moderna Chief Executive Stéphane Bancel thinks investors are wrong about the company’s cancer vaccine.
Moderna’s stock fell sharply over the past few days after data emerged about its cancer vaccine that investors found disappointing, though researchers called it breakthrough.
Bancel laid out his thoughts in an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Melanoma data
Bancel said the vaccine, known as intismeran, delivered a similar-size benefit in melanoma that started Keytruda, Merck’s immunotherapy, on its road to becoming a blockbuster drug.
“It’s the first time in melanoma that anything added to Keytruda is better than Keytruda,” he said.
Bancel expects the data—which shows how people are faring two years after getting the vaccine—to look even better over time. An earlier, smaller trial, showed an even greater level of risk reduction five years after the vaccine.
Cancer vaccine at pharmacies
If efforts to develop the vaccine for earlier-stage cancers prove out, Bancel said he envisions that patients with, say, early-stage lung cancer could walk into a pharmacy every three weeks for their nine doses of the cancer vaccine.
That would be a significant change since cancer drugs are normally given via intravenous drip at hospitals or medical centers, where doctors are on hand in the event of side effects.“Here the side effect is that of a vaccine: You might be tired tomorrow or spike a fever tonight, and that’s your side effect,” he said. “That might be a very different trade-off for a healthcare system to say we could actually save cost to your point by moving into pharmacy.”
‘Don’t want to teach competition’
Most drugs like Keytruda, which cost more than $200,000 a year for the average patient, will have far cheaper copies when its patents expire. Bancel said Moderna’s vaccine won’t.
The reason, he said, is because Moderna has proprietary software that scans a tumor’s DNA and picks up to 34 mutations for the vaccine to target. Competitors won’t be able to reverse-engineer it, he said, because the company has neither patented nor published the technology. “We don’t want to teach competition,” Bancel said.
He isn’t ruling out publishing this information for the public’s benefit somewhere down the line—but that won’t happen soon.
Biopsy problem
One issue during testing was that 17% of people who were initially screened had to be excluded because Moderna didn’t get enough of a tumor sample to customize its shot. Bancel said that rate was high, but he expects sampling tumors to improve.
“As we are prepping the launch of the product, Merck and Moderna have set up teams for hospitals to go train them,” he said.
Cancer vaccines as prevention
Bancel said he wants to develop vaccines that can prevent cancer altogether.
Moderna has an experimental vaccine that could do just that. It targets Lynch syndrome, an inherited condition that raises the risk of colon, ovarian and other cancers and is carried by about a million people in the U.S.
A small, early-stage trial at Oxford University is examining whether the vaccine is safe, and researchers will eventually check whether it prevents polyps—early precursors of colon cancer. Bancel envisions government screening campaigns to help find people with the condition and an annual pharmacy shot for those with the syndrome.
“I just prefer to do prevention,” Bancel said. “It’s better.”
Write to Xavier Martinez at xavier.martinez@wsj.com
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