What GPs need to know about the new melanoma mRNA vaccine

So in Nature just last week was published an article from...

Well, the news actually came out two, two or three weeks ago with this wonderful headline, "Moderna cancer vaccine stops melanoma returning.

Promising trials results suggest that cancer vaccines work and could be used to target other tumors." That's a pretty impressive headline, and you can imagine what the effects that might be.

So what did we see as a consequence of that publication? Well, one thing we saw was that at that day, the Moderna price sort of doubled and nearly tripled in one go.

It's up over 100% from pre-announcement.

The same also applied to the Merck shares, uh, which is the other medication involved in this process.

And again, both of these have stayed up for well over a week since that announcement time.

But what's really happening? What do we want to know? I suppose they did have to announce that to the market about this trial and these trial results because it, as it did, it influenced share price.

And that's one of these weird things in medicine these days is sometimes the data's released to the stock market before it's released to the doctors about what's actually going on.

What is it? So the vaccine they've created is one called intesmeran.

Now, I'm not sure about the pronunciation there, so we might hear different names used.

You can see it printed there.

And this is one of those things your patients might ask you, "Oh, so I can now get a vaccine and not get melanoma?" No, this is a vaccine for people who have already got a melanoma.

In fact, got metastatic melanoma, advanced melanoma, and it helps their immune system fight off, uh, the melanoma in combination with a one drug we're already using in this purpose.

So it's not preventing cancer, it's treating those who've already got the melanoma.

So the study enrolled one thousand one hundred people with advanced melanoma, and they've ha- already had that melanoma surgically removed.

Okay, so they've had their initial excisional biopsy.

They've had their wide excision.

They've also been identified as having metastatic disease.

And of that group of people, of eleven hundred people in the trial, one half received pembrolizumab, which is our, one of our current standard checkpoint inhibitors being used.

And the other group got a combination of pembro with this new treatment from Moderna, the mRNA vaccine.

What happened? Effectively what they've reported is that people on the combined treatment survived longer without recurrence than those did who received only pembro.

So both work, but the early data in this phase three trial are showing that they're getting even better results again with the combination compared to that one treatment alone.

And they've said that they're gonna present this in much more detail and have it published properly in the upcoming, in a medical conference, so people can actually do proper peer review and assessment of the results.

But again, this is a timing issue that they had to advise the market legally that this is gonna affect the share price and people knew of this information, so they had to release it to the market.