Moderna’s Shift to Cancer Company Lifts Stock Up 177%

Covid vaccines made Moderna a household name, but the company’s fortunes cratered as demand for the shots plummeted. Hostility from the Trump administration also spooked investors. As of Tuesday, the company’s stock had fallen nearly 90 percent from its peak, a loss of $170 billion in market value.

All the while, the company was quietly mounting a comeback in cancer.

On Wednesday, those efforts began to pay off in a big way. Moderna and the big drugmaker Merck reported that their experimental cancer vaccine extended the time before melanoma recurred in a clinical trial — the first late-stage study of its kind to succeed. The two drugmakers announced their success in news releases, without providing numbers that would indicate how much patients had benefited. Moderna’s stock closed up 177 percent on Wednesday.

The investors were betting that Moderna could help jump-start a new approach to treating certain cancers. The experimental vaccine uses the same messenger RNA, or mRNA, technology that powered Moderna’s Covid-19 shot, but it works differently to treat cancer. Tailored to each patient’s tumor genetics, the vaccine delivers instructions to produce a fragment of a tumor to teach the body’s immune system to attack the cancer.

Cancer vaccines using mRNA could become a hugely lucrative business, if the approach works across cancer types. Cutting-edge cancer drugs typically cost several hundred thousand dollars a year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/moderna-cancer-melanoma.html