Pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant Moderna (MRNA) saw its share price jump by 6% on Tuesday, 9 April 2024, following positive news regarding its possible cancer vaccine.
Moderna Jumps 6% On Vaccine News
MRNA shares rose as high as 9% during the day, continuing their recent steady climb.
This was enough for MRNA to lead the S&P 500’s list of top movers on Tuesday. The company presented details at the annual American Association for Cancer Research meeting on Monday. Here, it revealed interesting data on the use of its cancer vaccine combined with Merck’s Keytruda, which improved the overall survival rate in a patient trial compared to the use of Keytruda alone. These results were based on patients with HPV-negative head-and-neck squamous-cell cancer, known as HNSCC.
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Moderna revealed that the vaccine has been designed so that it recognises certain mutations in a person’s cancer cells, allowing it to then attack them. The company’s data now leads experts to believe that the cancer vaccine may work in other cases apart from its overall target use case of melanoma sufferers. It has confirmed evidence of the activation of patient immune response when using the vaccine, which was found to be safe to use in the trial. The share price suffered a poor year in 2023 but has risen by almost 14% this year.
Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel was recently quoted as saying:
There’s a very strong agreement at the highest level between the US government and China government that they want to collaborate on health care.
He confirmed that three of the company’s vaccines are moving into phase three trials.
