The coronavirus vaccine once made Moderna a household name, but as demand plummeted, the company's fortunes took a turn for the worse. The Trump administration's hostility has also unnerved investors. As of Tuesday, Moderna's stock price has fallen nearly 90% from its peak, and its market value has evaporated by US$170 billion.
At the same time, the company has been quietly making plans in the cancer field, seeking a comeback.
On Wednesday, those efforts began to pay off in a big way. Moderna and pharmaceutical giant Merck announced that an experimental cancer vaccine they collaborated on delayed the recurrence of melanoma in patients in a clinical trial - the first such success in a late-stage clinical trial for a vaccine of its kind. The two pharmaceutical companies announced the results through press releases, but did not provide specific data showing the extent of patient benefit. On Wednesday, Moderna's stock price closed up 177%.
Investors are betting that Moderna may help usher in a new way to treat certain cancers. The experimental vaccine uses the same messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) technology as Moderna's COVID-19 vaccine, but treats cancer differently. Vaccines are tailored to the genetic signature of each patient's tumor and train the immune system to attack cancer cells by delivering instructions to the body to produce tumor fragments.
If the technology works across multiple cancer types, mRNA cancer vaccines could become a lucrative business. Current cutting-edge cancer drugs typically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
Tyler Van Buren, an analyst at Wall Street investment bank TD Cowen, said that for Moderna, cancer "is undoubtedly the most important opportunity in its pipeline."
Moderna CEO Stephane Boncel told CNBC on Wednesday that the company's cancer vaccine development is the latest attempt to "make bold bets on scientific clinical programs."
The prospect of using mRNA vaccines to treat cancer has fascinated researchers for decades. But the field has only recently accelerated, in part because investments during the pandemic have spurred advances in manufacturing processes and other technologies.
By one count, as of last year, more than 60 cancer vaccines using mRNA or similar technologies were in development and being tested in more than 120 clinical trials. Many of these studies are funded by charities, governments and smaller biotech companies.
There are currently four large pharmaceutical companies leading R&D in this field. Two of them are Moderna and Merck, whose collaboration in this area goes back a decade; they are also testing the same vaccine to treat lung, kidney and bladder cancer. (In the trial whose results were announced Wednesday, test subjects received the cancer vaccine along with Merck’s blockbuster anti-cancer immune drug Keytruda.)
Another new coronavirus mRNA vaccine developer, BioNTech, is working with Genentech, a subsidiary of Roche, to develop a vaccine for the treatment of pancreatic cancer and colon cancer. Results from a small safety trial in patients with pancreatic cancer released this spring were encouraging.
This approach has historically been viewed as highly risky. Its production process is complicated, the political environment surrounding it is complicated, and there is little previous evidence that it can work. Other large anti-cancer drug companies, such as Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb, are not currently developing mRNA cancer vaccines.
Under the leadership of Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Trump administration has successively introduced unfavorable funding and policy adjustments for mRNA technology. A year ago, the federal government canceled nearly $500 million in contracts and other financial support related to mRNA technology.
“These political headwinds are very strong and deter a lot of companies,” said Jeff Kohler, a scientist at Johns Hopkins University who studies RNA. Kohler advises several small mRNA companies and is an executive committee member of the industry group the mRNA Drug Alliance.
However, the Trump administration may be sending a more open signal when it comes to using mRNA to treat cancer. This year, the government quietly launched a public-private partnership that is expected to fund clinical trials of different cancer vaccines, including those using mRNA technology. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday on the progress of the project or the amount of the funding.
Moderna was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2010 to develop drugs using mRNA technology. Its COVID-19 vaccine, the company's first product, has brought in tens of billions of dollars in revenue during the pandemic.
