To The Moon

Congrats to $Moderna, Inc.(MRNA)$ for delivering P3 results for the cancer vaccine 🧬

Even though I'm no longer a shareholder, I'm genuinely happy to see the trial succeed.

That said, the price reaction makes no sense to me. A Phase 3 win was fairly likely given the clear efficacy shown in Phase 2.

Now the real challenge is scaling this personalized therapy into a $10B+ franchise to justify a $40B valuation (50/50 split with Merck).

At the end of the day, between $25 and $100 basically nothing has changed. If anything, CMV failed and Norovirus is at risk. We'll see how it plays out, but looking back, I'd make the same call to sell and redeploy into better opportunities.

Then again, watching how the market's been behaving lately, sometimes it feels like you're better off going random than trying to reason about what something's actually worth.

What' more, i want to say the

5 things you don't know about Moderna's cancer "vaccine" 🧬

1) It's called a vaccine because it uses the same mRNA technology as the COVID-19 vaccine. However, it doesn't prevent melanoma. It treats melanoma and helps prevent metastases after surgery.

2) AI is used to develop this personalized therapy, but the work didn't start with the recent AI boom. The therapy was already in development before the COVID vaccine even existed.

3) The vaccine isn't given alone. It's administered in combination with pembrolizumab, the best selling cancer drug in the world.

4) The market is pricing in potential for this therapy because, just as it worked for melanoma, it could work for other cancers. Phase 3 trials are already underway for NSCLC (non-small cell lung cancer). Success in these new trials isn't guaranteed by the melanoma results, but it's certainly a positive signal.

5) Other companies, like BioNTech, are developing therapies based on the same technology.

Could this be the next revolution in cancer treatment, following the remarkable success of monoclonal antibodies (immunotherapy)?