Moderna Chief Executive StĂ©phane Bancel thinks investors are wrong about the companyâs cancer vaccine.Moderna CEO StĂ©phane Bancel.Modernaâs 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 dataBancel said the vaccine, known as intismeran, delivered a similar-size benefit in melanoma that started Keytruda, Merckâs immunotherapy, on its road to becoming a blockbuster drug.âItâs the first time in melanoma that anything added to Keytruda is better than Keytruda,â he said.Bancel expects the dataâwhich shows how people are faring two years after getting the vaccineâto 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 pharmaciesIf 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.âHere the side effect is that of a vaccine: You might be tired tomorrow or spike a fever tonight, and thatâs your side effect,â he said. âThat 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.ââDonât want to teach competitionâMost 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 Modernaâs vaccine wonât.The reason, he said, is because Moderna has proprietary software that scans a tumorâs DNA and picks up to 34 mutations for the vaccine to target. Competitors wonât be able to reverse-engineer it, he said, because the company has neither patented nor published the technology. âWe donât want to teach competition,â Bancel said.He isnât ruling out publishing this information for the publicâs benefit somewhere down the lineâbut that wonât happen soon.Biopsy problemOne issue during testing was that 17% of people who were initially screened had to be excluded because Moderna didnât get enough of a tumor sample to customize its shot.
Bancel said that rate was high, but he expects sampling tumors to improve.âAs we are prepping the launch of the product, Merck and Moderna have set up teams for hospitals to go train them,â he said.Cancer vaccines as preventionBancel 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 polypsâearly 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.âI just prefer to do prevention,â Bancel said. âItâs better.âWrite to Xavier Martinez at xavier.martinez@wsj.com