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Will Moderna’s Cancer Vaccine Be Good for People, or Profits?

The drug giant restricted access to its Covid vaccine to protect its bottom line. Will history repeat itself now?

Moderna Inc. and Merck & Co. mRNA melanoma trial news on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, on Wednesday, August 19, 2026.

The mRNA Covid vaccines saved millions of lives. Though the United States had higher excess deaths from SARS-CoV-2 than other peer nations in the G7, it could have been a whole lot worse without the development and rollout of these immunogens. The technology powering mRNA vaccines is truly remarkable, and the Nobel Prize that Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman received for the foundational discoveries that made these vaccines possible was well deserved.

Since the arrival of these vaccines, there has been a flurry of activity to use mRNA technology to fight other diseases. A landmark “phase 3” study of an mRNA vaccine for melanoma, announced by Moderna and Merck in August, suggests that we may have found a winner.

In the study, patients were assigned to Merck’s Keytruda (or pembrolizumab, an immunotherapy drug) either with or without Moderna’s new vaccine (intisimeran, AKA mRNA-4157, an individualized neoantigen therapy). The combo extended the time patients lived without a recurrence of melanoma compared with Keytruda alone, while the treatment also reduced the risk of the cancer’s metastasizing across the body. Moderna’s mRNA vaccine for melanoma is also a personalized treatment—rather than targeting common tumor antigens, the vaccine is custom-made for each patient by identifying neoantigens (abnormal proteins associated with cancer cells) that are specific to their own tumor.

While phase 3 studies are the last port of call before regulatory approval by the FDA, the Moderna/Merck study is still underway. Immunotherapy for cancer is, as Science magazine’s Derek Lowe cautions us, “a hideously complex........

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