A customized Moderna Inc.
MRNA vaccine helped ward off the recurrence of melanoma in a mid-stage trial, a milestone in long-running efforts to use the shots as treatments and a big step in the biotech’s ascent.
The combination of Moderna’s personalized cancer vaccine and Merck's Keytruda cancer immunotherapy
reduced patients’ risk of relapse or death by about 44%, versus Keytruda alone, in the 150-volunteer study, the companies said Tuesday.
The results, which the companies said were statistically significant but haven’t been reviewed by independent scientists, suggest promise for an emerging but
unproven class of vaccines that aim to treat diseases rather than prevent infections like typical shots.
If the combination proves successful in further testing, the results could broaden the applications for Moderna’s
messenger RNA platform beyond the Covid-19 vaccine that was the first commercial use for the
gene-based technology.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/modern...reliminary-study-11670906379?mod=hp_lead_pos4