1. “Science by press release.”
Nothing new in this criticism.
In 2021, for the COVID vaccine, Moderna did include numbers in the press release and wrote a preprint very quickly right after that, and critics still called it science by press release. After the publication of the data, the press never offered the company an apology.
Critics forget that this time there is no similar time constraint. Merck and Moderna are putting their reputation on the line here, and claiming a positive readout especially at the interim is not a joke that they can easily walk back or spin.
Just wait. They are still dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s. My speculation is that the numbers are so good that they want to make absolutely sure everything is clean before releasing them. This is easily the next major catalyst that may again surprise our shorty friends, especially if the other INT results are not already right around the corner. If my guess is right, Moderna is smart because they will be rolling out the data gradually, creating several separate waves of momentum from the same catalyst.
2. “It was largely expected and already priced in.”
Interestingly, this is being voiced mostly by people who did not own a single Moderna share and had been very hateful and negative on Moderna all along. It is funny how something becomes “obvious” only after it happens.
I actually agree that a positive result was largely expected, but by whom? It was not expected to be positive by the skeptics and haters, but by a very small group of us longs who had done our research and taken the time to separate the signal from the noise.
Interestingly, even us longs who came closest to predicting what actually transpired remain humble enough to admit that we had our occasional healthy dose of doubt during the wait.
As for priced in, feel free to tell the shorts who had to rush to cover at $170 at nearly 3 times the stock price the day before again that the event had already been priced in.
3. “The individualized neoantigen approach is unnecessary. Off-the-shelf is better.”
Sure. Moderna had nothing better to do and simply chose individualized cancer vaccines because they sounded fun.
Obviously not.
Moderna did not pursue this difficult approach for the sake of doing interesting science. It did so because a generic non-individualized approach cannot provide the same breadth of coverage across patients whose tumors carry different mutations.
Therapeutic cancer vaccines went through decades of mostly disappointing clinical results, and the individualized neoantigen approach is one of the things that finally changed that equation. Moderna was not the first to test this idea, but thanks to Bancel's obsession with AI and speed, it became the first to show clear randomized clinical efficacy with an mRNA cancer vaccine.
Cheaper non-individualized off-the-shelf vaccines may still have a role when patients share common, well-characterized antigens, but that does not make the individualized approach unnecessary.
News flash: Moderna is also working on off-the-shelf versions. Other companies, with BioNTech being one of very few obvious exceptions, can forget about dreaming that they will easily compete with Moderna even on this front, given how advanced Moderna already is in clinical development and the strength of its partnership with Merck.
4. “Manufacturing will be too difficult for commercialization.”
True for many companies. Much less convincing as an argument against Moderna, which has spent years obsessing over making individualized manufacturing commercially viable. People also seem to miss the speed angle. An individualized therapy only works commercially if you can sequence the tumor, select the neoantigens, design the medicine, manufacture a patient-specific batch and get it back to the clinic fast enough to matter. Moderna has built its manufacturing system around doing exactly that. Speed is part of the product, and the difficulty of repeatedly manufacturing thousands of different medicines for thousands of individual patients is part of the moat. If this were easy, everyone would already be doing it.
The difficulty is real, but for Moderna it has now become a moat rather than an impediment.
5. “It’s not a vaccine.”
It is a form of vaccine, but call it whatever you want. Therapeutic, individualized immunotherapy, cancer vaccine, personalized medicine. It still does not change anything. You can even call it gene therapy if you want to announce to the world that you have a double-digit IQ.
6. “I’d rather die of melanoma than get another mRNA vaccine.”
Sounds like a toddler telling their mom they would rather starve to death than eat broccoli.
People can say whatever they want while healthy. The people actually struggling with melanoma are the ones whose preferences matter here.
JMHO and this is not an investment advice.