moderna The company’s stock price fell by as much as 25% on Thursday following the leak of partial data on a cancer vaccine developed by the company. Merck.
Shares of both drug companies fell even though the data, fully released late Thursday following the breach, had implications for patients and looked positive compared to Wall Street expectations.
Combining a personalized vaccine known as Intismeran autogenic with Merck’s immunotherapy Keytruda reduced the risk of recurrence or death in certain melanoma patients by 42% compared to Keytruda alone.
The data also showed that combination therapy with Keytruda reduced the risk of cancer spreading to distant parts of the body or death by 38% compared to immunotherapy alone.
The companies announced that approximately 82% of patients who received the combination of personalized cancer vaccine and Keytruda were alive without their melanoma returning two years after vaccination, compared to 70% of patients who received Keytruda alone.
“This is a huge advance for patients,” Dr. Hussein Tobi, a melanoma expert and study investigator at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, said of the results.
He said an added benefit of the vaccine is that it has far fewer side effects than other cancer treatments, such as toxicity and pain at the injection site.
Detailed phase 3 trial results are expected to be presented at this weekend’s European Society of Medical Oncology Congress.
“When you use a therapy on top of a highly effective therapy like Keytruda, it can be difficult to show additional effects. We have no problem showing additional effects here,” Dr. Dean Lee, director of Merck Research Laboratories, said in an interview ahead of the release of the results.
The benefit was even greater after six months of vaccination, with another analysis showing a 58% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death. The companies say it is still too early to tell whether the treatment will help patients live longer overall.
Several analysts acknowledged that investor expectations had risen before the announcement, but noted that the data was overall positive.
“We argue that this relative reduction in recurrence and death is clinically meaningful,” BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan Sagerman said in a research note Thursday after the leak. “Such (stock price) reactions likely reflect heightened expectations for full data release rather than a true indictment of the efficacy of the combination therapy.”
Oncologists and investors believe this targeted vaccine could be a breakthrough treatment and could be used to treat other forms of cancer in the future. Merck and Moderna are studying their vaccines in several trials in other tumors, including non-small cell lung cancer, bladder cancer, and renal cell cancer.
But Lee acknowledged that the company needs more research to show the product is effective across tumor types.
“I can dream of building a log cabin, but I have some pieces of wood and I just felled a tree,” Lee said. “You don’t get a hut or a village by just knocking down one tree.”
The shot is designed to target specific mutations within each patient’s tumor, rather than using a one-size-fits-all approach. The idea is to train the immune system to recognize and kill these unique cancer markers, and combine that response with Keytruda to help the body attack cancer more effectively.
It could also provide an important additional commercial product to Moderna’s pipeline, following vaccines for COVID-19, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.
“This is a strong data set overall,” UBS analysts said in a research note Thursday, giving them further confidence in future studies of vaccines for kidney and bladder cancer. They added that the stock price reaction may be due to greater expectations than disappointing data.
With such high expectations, Moderna stock has soared more than 530% since the beginning of the year as of Thursday afternoon.
Shares of Merck, a much larger pharmaceutical company, fell about 1% on Thursday. The company’s stock price has increased nearly 41% this year.
Because vaccines are individualized, the complex manufacturing process can take six weeks. But Merck CEO Robert Davis told CNBC last week that the company believes it could shorten that timeline in the future and potentially administer the vaccine to more patients more quickly.
