Moderna–Merck personalized mRNA cancer therapy — first positive Phase 3

Okay, Moderna and Merck have just announced that a cancer treatment made using the genetic information inside an individual's tumor has just succeeded in phase three. The medicine they make for one person and the medicine they make for another would literally contain different genetic instructions. They have to sequence a tumor before they can manufacture it. And before someone says, haven't cancer vaccines existed for years? Yes, Russia even reported treating its first patient with a personalized melanoma vaccine this past April. So what actually happened this week? Let me tell you. I'm Giga Chen and in the next 90 seconds, you're going to understand exactly how this works, what a neoantigen is, and why phase three changes the story. First, this isn't a vaccine you take to prevent cancer. These patients already had high-risk melanoma and the surgeons have removed it. Scientists take the tumor and sequence its DNA. DNA is written using four chemical letters A, C, G, and T. Sequencing basically means reading those letters in order. Then you compare the tumor with normal cells from the same person to find the mutations that appeared in the cancer. And this is where it gets really interesting. Some of those mutations change the proteins the cancer makes. Your cells constantly break proteins into tiny pieces and then display some of those pieces for your immune system to inspect. An antigen is basically a molecular target your immune system can recognize and respond to. So if a…