Moderna's mRNA Vaccine Success Raises Expectations for Personalized Cancer Vaccines

The success of Merck and Moderna's intismeran autogene mRNA vaccine has raised expectations for personalized cancer vaccines across the industry.

However, getting these products to patients presents new challenges. In the past, the focus was on 'scaling up', but now it's about 'scaling out and scaling down'.

Moderna sequences an individual's cancer and healthy cells using an automated bioinformatics system to identify patient-specific neoantigens, which are then formulated in a lipid nanoparticle delivery system. This triggers protein production in the body to drive an immune response against the tumor.

The time from sample collection to vaccine administration has been reduced from seven to eight weeks in 2019 to around six weeks in 2025, and can likely be brought under one month, according to analysts at Guggenheim Securities.