The company has been on our radar here, for nearly 15 years, of the nearly 25 we’ve been writing this blog.
We’ve decried the irrational bashing of it, before (and after) COVID — and in truth we’ve made scads of money by owning it — and only selling some of it — when it gets over-heated. [Hint: that is not today, or even in the next few years.]
[Most of all, we are duly-gratified that people who actually listened to us did not “panic sell / dump” — when it dropped to ~$38. It lately trades between $220 and $260 a share now.] Here’s the pop-science-y Time Magazine piece on it all, of three days past:
…It’s been a very good year for Stéphane Bancel. On a crisp October day, the CEO of Moderna, of COVID-vaccine fame, is sitting in his glass-walled office in the company’s headquarters in Cambridge, Mass., weeks before encouraging results from the company’s first mRNA cancer vaccine would become public. He’s recounting the biotech’s rocky road turning an unproven, scientifically dismissed approach—using messenger RNA, or mRNA, the genetic code that instructs cells to make proteins—into a platform for producing new categories of medicines. . . .
The company’s goal isn’t to follow the usual road map and make one type of drug for one disease at a time, but to build a new platform from which a variety of different treatments can be developed in a plug-and-play scenario—similar to how the computer-technology industry is built on the foundational hardware and operating systems around which a whole universe of software has blossomed. “mRNA is the information molecule, so if you find the way to safely and effectively get it into the right cells, you can unlock a lot of medicines to help people’s suffering,” says Bancel….
Moderna’s mRNA COVID vaccine saved an estimated 2 million lives globally — while earning the company $46 billion—from 2021 to 2024. This fall, people are getting its newly approved mRNA flu shot, the first of its kind. And in October, Moderna announced with Merck that their mRNA approach also worked to stimulate the immune system to fight cancer—creating a therapeutic vaccine, rather than a preventative one. Intismeran, combined with one of Merck’s drugs, successfully kept melanoma from recurring in a group of patients with mid- to late-stage disease….
Onward — to another likely jet into the High Rockies at mid-week. Smiling — but a perhaps tough week ahead. These cancer vaccines really will change the world — of oncology — and give long lives to people who previously faced near term death sentences. Word.
नमस्ते
