National Cancer Institute’s director, Dr. Anthony Letai, wants a national effort behind the vaccines, The New York Times reported on Friday.
- The bet is a public-private partnership among the NIH, the nonprofit Foundation for the NIH, researchers, drug and biotech companies, advocacy groups, philanthropies, and patients.
- Stacey Adam, a senior clinical officer at the foundation, told the Times she hopes it will resemble the collaboration that produced COVID shots.
- Cancer vaccines, unlike most other vaccines, are treatments, not preventives.
Vaccine stocks rallied on Friday after a report on new details of a national push to speed up personalized cancer vaccines.
Novavax (NVAX) closed up about 16% near $13, Moderna (MRNA) about 14% near $225, and Vaxcyte (PCVX) about 10%. BioNTech (BNTX) was up about 5%, Merck (MRK) about 2%, and Pfizer (PFE) a little more than 2%.
Moderna had a second tailwind: it rejoined the Nasdaq-100 before the market open. Vaxcyte was already higher this week on its own pneumococcal vaccine data. Novavax has no cancer-vaccine program but a vaccine platform, and the stock moved on sympathy buying.
NCI Aims To Start A Partnership In December
National Cancer Institute’s director, Dr. Anthony Letai, wants a national effort behind the vaccines, The New York Times reported on Friday. “We can place big bets on new ideas,” he said of new resources at the National Institutes of Health.
The bet is a public-private partnership among the NIH, the nonprofit Foundation for the NIH, researchers, drug and biotech companies, advocacy groups, philanthropies, and patients. Stacey Adam, a senior clinical officer at the foundation, told the paper that she hopes it will resemble the collaboration that produced COVID shots.
She said the program is expected to begin in December, starting with pancreatic, liver, and colorectal cancers, plus a subset of pediatric tumors. Adam’s goal is that within seven to ten years a patient could get a vaccine in a doctor’s office, faster than the eight to 15 years she said approval can take when the work is fragmented.
Merck, Moderna, And BioNTech Already Have Shots In Trials
Cancer vaccines, unlike most other vaccines, are treatments, not preventives. Each is built for one patient, meant to train T cells to attack abnormal proteins found on that person’s tumor and nowhere else. Most use mRNA, a technology the newspaper noted had fallen out of favor with the Trump administration.
The furthest along in cancer vaccines is Merck and Moderna’s personalized mRNA vaccine, intismeran autogene, also called V940. In a study of 1,137 people with advanced melanoma, the companies said in August that the shot plus Keytruda lengthened the time before cancers returned and before they spread.
That is the only cancer-vaccine trial large enough so far to show definitive results. The full dataset is due at the ESMO meeting in Madrid on October 24, and the partners are also testing the approach in other tumors, including lung and bladder cancer.
BioNTech is the other main public name. With Genentech, it is developing autogene cevumeran: a small pancreatic-cancer study found that seven of eight patients who responded to the vaccine were still alive after as long as six years of follow-up, against two of eight who did not respond, and a 260-patient trial began in 2023. BioNTech is also advancing separate cancer-vaccine programs, including BNT113 and BNT116.
How Did Retail Traders React?
On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around MRNA and NVAX was ‘bullish’ at the time of writing, while sentiment around BNTX, MRK and PFE was either ‘bearish’ or ‘neutral.’
While MRNA stock has added over 660% year-to-date, MRK has gained 38%. NVAX has added 90%, and BNTX has added 2%.
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