Mechanically, it is similar to the COVID-19 vaccines. Of course, what is different is that the patient is being vaccinated against cancer, not a virus.
And it looks like a potential success. This year, Moderna and Merck showed that such shots halve the chance of dying from a recurrence after surgery in patients with the deadliest form of skin cancer.
In its formal communications, like regulatory filings, Moderna has not called the shot a cancer vaccine until 2023. That’s when it partnered with Merck and rebranded the technology as Individualized Neoantigen Therapy, or INT. Moderna’s CEO said at the time that the name change was intended to “better describe the goal of the program.” (European vaccine maker BioNTech, also working on cancer, also changed its language in its latest report, moving from “neoantigen vaccine” to “mRNA cancer immunotherapy” in 2021.)
The rationale for offering it as a therapy is that patients already have cancer – so it is a treatment as opposed to a preventative measure. But it’s no secret what the second goal is: to keep critical innovation away from vaccine fears stoked by high-ranking US officials. “Vaccines are probably a dirty word these days, but we still believe in the science and harnessing your immune system to not only fight infection, but hopefully cancer as well,” Kyle Hollen, head of Moderna’s cancer program, said last summer during BIO 2025, a large biotech event in Boston.
Not everyone is happy with the word play. Take Ryan Sullivan, a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, who has enrolled patients in Moderna’s trials. He says the change raises questions about whether trial volunteers are being properly informed. “There is some concern that there will be patients who will refuse to have their cancer treated because it is a vaccine,” Sullivan told me. “But I also thought it was important, as did many of my colleagues, that you have to call it what it is.”
