Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel has a message to Wall Street: Ignore the noise, watch the science.
It got Bancel's goat Thursday when Moderna's stock tanked following a data leak for the drugmaker's cancer-vaccine candidate, intismeran autogene, which is co-developed with Merck.
"We were a bit surprised," Bancel tells us as part of our At Barron's interview series." But the key, what we always focus on, is the data." In high-risk melanoma patients, those numbers showed a 42% reduction in the risk of recurrence or death when intismeran was combined with Merck's Keytruda, compared with Keytruda alone.
The vaccine candidate sparked a wave of excitement in August, when late-stage trial data showed it prevented melanoma from returning more effectively than one of the market's leading immunotherapies, suddenly positioning Moderna as a serious contender in oncology.
So, if the trial showed a 42% reduction, why did the stock plunge 18% on Thursday, narrowly missing its biggest same-day percentage drop on record? Were investors looking for an even higher number? Were they buying on the rumor, selling on the news? Were they expecting a read-through to intismeran's efficacy in other cancers, outcomes that remain unproven as other trials continue?
"I think all the things you mentioned could be the reason," Bancel says about the selloff, which occurred days before a prominent oncology conference. "You need to ask investors and hedge funds, not me," he adds.
Investors have been on a roller-coaster ride in recent years, starting when Moderna went public in 2018 following one of the biggest initial public offerings in biotech history. French-born Bancel became CEO in 2011, a year after the company's founding, when it was still a tiny start-up. Today, it has a market cap of nearly $80 billion, largely due to the excitement around intismeran.
Bancel doesn't dwell on the stock swings. "As a business, we focus on science and the patients," he says. When the conversation turns to the clinical potential of Moderna's pipeline, however, his restraint vanishes -- especially regarding intismeran, the candidate that was once viewed as a big gamble.
"Some people think over time it could be bigger than Keytruda," Bancel says, referring to Merck's blockbuster immunotherapy, which generates $32 billion each year. "Again, over time. Not next week. We believe it will work everywhere Keytruda works."
For Moderna, oncology marks the centerpiece of an ambitious second act. The Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech famously created the first COVID-19 vaccine in 2020 in a matter of weeks. Its stock price jumped from $12 in August 2019 to $490 two years later.
Investor sentiment cooled, however, and by last November, the stock fell to $22, only to soar again, back up over $250 this summer on the back of a partial Phase 3 trial readout for intismeran. And now the stock has given back some of those gains, recently trading at $197. To Bancel, that move is tantamount to a bump in the road. Ultimately, the CEO explains, "we are quite confident it's going to work in many cancer types, which is why we're investing."
The data will tell.
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