Moderna, Merck Say mRNA Vaccine Prevents Melanoma From Returning 73
Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. [...] This is the first positive late-stage trial result for an mRNA cancer vaccine, which trains a patient's immune system to fight tumors by targeting specific mutations in those cells and the first such study to show that adding a treatment to Keytruda worked better than that therapy alone. Similar approaches are being tested against lung, breast and pancreatic cancers.
[...] The cancer treatment combines Merck's Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients' own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers. "The positive hit here leads us into truly this next phase in immunotherapy," Knudsen said. "This is an auspicious start -- this is where things begin."
Moderna shares more than doubled on the news, adding about $30 billion to its market value.
[...] The cancer treatment combines Merck's Keytruda with a made-to-order mRNA vaccine from Moderna that is based on an analysis of mutations found in the patients' own tumors. The trial enrolled 1,137 high-risk patients with stage IIB-IV melanoma that had been surgically removed. Volunteers were randomized to receive up to nine doses of Keytruda plus the personalized vaccine or Keytruda alone for about one year. The companies said no new safety signals have emerged in the trial. In January, the companies announced results of a mid-stage trial of the treatment showing that it reduced the risk of recurrence or death by 49% after five years. Karen Knudsen, CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, said the Moderna results could signal a new era for treating solid-tumor cancers. "The positive hit here leads us into truly this next phase in immunotherapy," Knudsen said. "This is an auspicious start -- this is where things begin."
Moderna shares more than doubled on the news, adding about $30 billion to its market value.
Sad that a company that actually does something (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's sad that once again we have a company that is providing a direct benefit to the world and they're worth only $30b when you have shitty AI companies that make the world a worse place that are worth many times that.
Re:Sad that a company that actually does something (Score:4)
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Re:Sad that a company that actually does something (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Sad that a company that actually does something (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why a lot of chronic diseases will NEVER have cures. It's more profitable to treat than to cure. Treat someone over a lifetime and milk 100k out of them. Treat someone once and present them with a 100k price tag to pay all at once and the consumer or insurance company will balk at the cost.
It's a fun conspiracy theory, but this is actually just how biology works.
There's basically four kinds of things that can go wrong with our bodies. Infections, mechanical issues, system errors, and cancer.
Infections we can cure by helping the body to kill off the infection, it's only some rare stubborn ones like AIDS that are chronic like you describe.
Mechanical issues we can fix with surgery.
System errors? That's stuff like genetic disorders where our body creates too much of hormone A or doesn't create the proper form of protein B. The problem is in our DNA and you can't cure it without rewriting our DNA (which we're getting to).
And then there's cancers, which are similar to infections, where we try to kill it (as they're doing here), though weirdly, some research suggests treating it as a chronic issue might be better for the patients.
In either case, it's not the fact that pharma is deciding "don't make a pill to cure it, just find a lifetime treatment!". It's only in the past few years that we're reaching the point where we can actually cure things that were traditionally chronic.
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mostly, but your taxonomy doesn't include metabolic syndrome and the interrelated things that come out of it:
High blood pressure, "heart disease", diabetes, chronic kidney disease, some cancers....
and the possibly related auto-immune diseases.
So a lot of spend goes to that. when it could be addressed with (significant) lifestyle and diet changes.
I mean i guess you can put all this under DNA in that there's a mismatch between our DNA and our environment (including society) which causes us these issues.
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Stop repeating this. It's just something someone made up and it's generally not true. You can make lots of money curing a disease. Insurance companies, both public and private, are quite capable of doing math and curative treatments are often priced based on the total cost of alternative management only treatments.
Re:Sad that a company that actually does something (Score:4, Informative)
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You are forgetting the other leg of the chair for treatment: The insurance companies paying the bills. If the cure costs less than extended treatment, the insurance company will start saying "the cure costs less money, start prescribing the cure"
You can be sure the insurance companies are looking at the treatment costs for the vaccine and looking the treatment cost for radiation/chemo and are going to quickly say "the vaccine is cheaper works better, start with that"
except "the cure" will never have been developed.
Also, we've given insurance companies themselves rather perverse incentives. Everyone hates "overhead" and "administrative cost"... so we introduce the "medical loss ratio"! Basically insurance companies have to spend ~80%-85% of premiums on medical care. They don't really have an incentive to limit the cost of care.... because if medical care costs less then their profits (which are a small fraction of the remaining 15%) are smaller too.
(there are some
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While I get the skepticism towards big pharma , I dont see any evidence of any of them thinking this way. Cures are cashmoney right there in the pocket, and if you dont have the patent on the maintainence drug, then competition dictates that if you can beat your opponent by getting the cure, then your going to destroy your opposition and win. Capitalism prefers long term payments, but to state this is th
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There's a balance here, specially with the de-aging treatments we're coming up with.
If you make someone live to 150 somehow, that will be 110 years of de-aging treatment.
And there's no definitive cure for aging, not one that you can afford anyway.
Cancers can be pretty profitable, but they will also kill your patient pretty quickly in most cases.
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The real money is treating something forever and ever, like blood pressure medication.
BP meds are generic and cranked out by Indian drug manufacturers for pennies. Big Pharma isn’t even in the loop.
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"sterilize anyone who might be a bad parent,"
IOW making less than $250,000
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say something like "execute all homeless people, sterilize anyone who might be a bad parent, and put in prison people with X color skin, and anyone in this exact demographic and crime as well and terrorism, crime, addiction, theft, and assault will go down 90%!" It's not that simple
Then don't vote for him.
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Just look at the 30% of morons in Germany that believed Hitler's bullshit.
And the 50% in 2024 that believed Trump's. Luckily he's fucking up so badly and obviously that a few are starting to wake up.
The new definition of "woke" should be those Repubs that have woken up from believing in Trump's hallucinations.
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I think it's sad that once again we have a company that is providing a direct benefit to the world and they're worth only $30b when you have shitty AI companies that make the world a worse place that are worth many times that.
You're asking for vaccines to be seen as more profitable, to justify pharmaceutical company valuations higher than __ only__ thirty billion dollars. You mean like why don't we pay more?
Shouldn't you be upset at spending levels on research, for things that benefit the entire world, and not their market value? You can hate AI, and it can be overvalued, but... why medicine doesn't cost more?
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Considering they are only worth $30bn, government should just get together and fund this stuff, and make the resulting treatments available at cost. $30bn is a drop in the bucket of even a single national government's budget.
How this may play out (Score:5, Insightful)
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> our own oligarchs will demand its availability here
Why would they? They can get the vaccine for themselves from overseas (obviously, FDA rules don't apply to them) or travel to Europe to get the shot (and also pay European prices). Making the vaccine available in the USA would mean the hoi polloi wouldn't get some preventable diseases and won't need to keep paying the oligarchs.
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given that it uses mRNA, it is likely that parts of the US right will either refuse to use it or will try to block it.
Self correcting problem. Since cancer is not contagious, I have no problem with people choosing not to seek treatment for themselves. The collateral damage of their family members is unfortunate.
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Yeah, a fucking idiot of a Spiritual Healer told his wife she did not need any medical treatment as he was gonna lay his healing hands on her and by the power of Jesus she shall be cured.. Against everyone else's advice she said she believed her husband could cure her breast cancer, 9 months later he is sobbing around the grave.
Anyway, 2 months he cheered himself up and then found out he had stage 4 bowel cancer, so by the power of Jesus he lay his hands on himself and died 6 weeks later.
And all his spirit
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If idiots with non-communicable health problems decide to self-select out of the gene pool, I'm fine with it.
My problem comes when you decide to self-select out of preventative medicine that makes you an attack vector to others. That makes you a selfish git dumbass.
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One set of cancer-causing agents is transmittable from one human to another, there is a general (not custom) vaccine, and a non-zero fraction of right-wing nutjobs don't want their children to have it.
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They don’t want *anyone* to have it, not least because the most common transmission route involves sex, and they cannot cope with anything to do with teens and sex, except of course, the rape of teens by men in power, which they are absolutely a-ok with.
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Honestly? I think your last statement there is a key point that should receive a little more attention. It seems possible --- heck, even prudent -- for a person to question possible negative outcomes from mRNA vaccines, while still fully recognizing that it makes good sense to use one on an existing disease. Even in a nearly worst-case scenario? You're talking about cancer, which surely kills a person if not treated, vs a theoretical risk of some long-term problems from an mRNA vaccine (some of which even
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Unfortunately, since it requires an individual design for a specific person, it likely is going to not benefit much from economies of scale
I'm not seeing that announced clearly. The PR [merck.com] says KEYTRUDA targets PD-1. It seems as likely that they only needed to do a biopsy and genetic analysis of the cancer to determine whether targeting PD-1 would be effective. This is already fairly common, though it's not done for every patient today.
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Re:How this may play out (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't think that's correct? Possibly I'm misreading this, but it looks like the study involved giving two things, both the Keytruda, and a separate personalized vaccine.
You're not misreading it. It is individualized. Different cancers express different antigens, and the mRNA vaccine needs to construct something that expresses those same antigens to train the immune system to attack them.
The nice thing about mRNA, is that it is potentially relatively cheap to synthesize mRNA strands and replicate them. It won't be hundreds of dollars, but it won't be millions, either. Right now, I think it's hundreds of thousands per patient, but that will go down over time as they streamline the process of taking a sample of the tumor and determining an mRNA gene sequence that matches said cancer. And economies of scale on the equipment will also probably help.
It may also be the case that it becomes less individualized over time. At some point, we might reach the point where they have a bunch of pre-sequenced antigens that are all ready to go, and someone just keys in a list of antigens, and a piece of software spits out the mRNA sequence. At that point, it is still individualized, but with a much, much more streamlined process for generating it.
Note that I don't work in this field, so take all of this as the opinion of an educated layperson observer. :-)
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It's pretty easy to make a bit of RNA to a particular specification. You (actually you) can order some up on the Internet and they'll ship it to you. Generally it costs hundreds of dollars, not thousands. Something really long, like the RNA for the SARS CoV2 spike protein might be $2k or so. Those prices are falling pretty fast too.
Actually sequencing the tumour is in th
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Re: How this may play out (Score:2)
The real issue is that the packaging process used to create vaccines in quantity is a process where you mix a tank of mRNA with a tank of other stuff and get a tank of lipid nanoparticles. Getting different mRNA in each dose means you only get one patient's vaccine per time you start and stop the machine. There's also a step where one copy of mRNA is used to make a macroscopic quantity of copies in a bioreactor that needs to be flushed in between different sequences, but can just run when making enough of t
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The packaging isn't that difficult. Small bioreactors are a thing, and are generally easier to build than big ones. You can e-mail a sequence to a manufacturer and get a vial of lipid encapsulated mRNA right now for high hundreds or single digit thousands of dollars, depending on the length of the sequence.
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Remember that the costs have to be compared against the baseline costs-to-treat for the relevant population, which is often going to be cancer patients, and their treatment costs are already eye-watering. If this approach can genuinely cut recurrence, it may be a net saving.
But you don't want to turn magnetic (Score:2)
Do you???
This is amazing news! (Score:5, Insightful)
... or would be, under any other presidential administration.
Still, the rest of the world can certainly benefit from it.
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It's a relevant post - the Trump administration has directly attacked mRNA vaccines.
Re: This is amazing news! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now, under what legislation led to this price drop?
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This is a custom vaccine - likely very $$$ (Score:3)
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I would not be surprised if it becomes the most expensive drug on the market.
In the USA.
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Going outside, touching that elevator button, driving your car, eating that cheeseburger, dining on fresh dolphin meat... all increases your chances of any one of a billion different diseases and infections and contaminations and accidents. Oh, Noes!
How many people died _solely because of_ the COVID vaccine, and not some underlying health condition?
Medicine is always about the money... whether it's a vaccine for melanoma or treating you for pneumonia... it's going to cost you. You don't necessarily have t
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Please, don't get it. Better yet, don't get any medicine. The rest of the world will be thankful.
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Nothing but ivermectin and colloidal silver for that guy.
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Those sound pretty unnatural. Chemicals for sure. I recommend taint tanning.
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I feel like you're just upset that they're not working hard enough for the cure to your condition - mental illness.
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This has to be a parody, right? You’re lampooning idiocy, correct?
Did anyone else read the headline as: (Score:1)
"mRNA Vaccine Prevents Melania From Returning"
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"mRNA Vaccine Prevents Melodrama From Returning"
Hope this available (Score:2)
Diet and lifestyle changes also provide hope (Score:2)
You can also often reduce the risk of cancer recurrence significantly via diet (e.g. avoiding most or all animal products and ultraprocessed foods, and eating lots of greens, beans, onions, mushrooms, berries & fruits, and nut & seeds) -- especially along with other lifestyle changes like exercise, avoiding smoking and alcohol, stress reduction, good sleep, community, etc..
"G-BOMBS: The anti-cancer foods that should be in your diet right now"
https://www.drfuhrman.com/arti... [drfuhrman.com]
Problem is there is not m
Kill the host (Score:2)
But does it increase life expectancy? (Score:2)
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Concept Is Not News (Score:2)
The concept of custom mRNA vaccines was reported in the December 2025 issue of Scientific American magazine. There, such a vaccine was described as successfully treating pancreatic cancer.