Yet another Hacker News

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

76 points _Microft 1 hour ago 13 comments

reilly3000 44 minutes ago | parent

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

JumpCrisscross 1 minute ago | parent

Note that the trial was for “stage IIB–IV melanoma that had been surgically removed prior to entering the trial.”

> lost my dad to cancer because of cancer medication

Please don’t phrase it like this. Loss is hard. But desperate people have skipped treatment because they misread something online.

_Microft 39 minutes ago | parent

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

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

londons_explore 38 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

estearum 32 minutes ago | parent

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.

zetazzed 36 minutes ago | parent

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.)

CamelCaseName 12 minutes ago | parent

Not a huge surprise given the absolute face ripping jump MRNA had when the vaccine was first announced. The ~$20B company jumped 174% overnight, and then climbed another 70% over the last two months, now only dropping 18% on this news.

To illustrate how much they've gone up, this 18% drop is just slightly less than their entire market cap in June (four months ago)

wrs 27 minutes ago | parent

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.

TaupeRanger 22 minutes ago | parent

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.