Moderna Is Now a Cancer Company, and It's Not the Only One Pivoting

It won’t stop with melanoma. Yes, you read that right. That’s the beauty of commercial leaps. They beget copious investment in search of the advances given life by the original advance.

As readers already know well, and as was discussed here last week, Moderna’s long-term collaboration with Merck has resulted in a vaccine for melanoma. While it’s not yet seen as a certain cure for the would-be killer, the vaccine is seen as effective when it comes to keeping melanoma from returning or spreading.

As a New York Times headline put it about this amazing jump, “Moderna’s Pivot to Cancer Company Lifts Stock 177% in One Day.” Yes, precisely. Think of the profound meaning in the headline. And in thinking about it, never forget that stock prices are a reflection of not the present, but what’s expected in the future.

In other words, Merck and Moderna are applying the same vaccine to lung, kidney and bladder cancer. There’s your stock rally. In baseball terms, we’re in the early innings of cancer vaccines.

As the Times also reported, “As of last year, more than 60 cancer vaccines using mRNA or similar technology were in development.” Yes, early innings.

For evidence supporting this claim, think how substantially the outlook in the U.S. technology sector changed after November 30, 2022. It was on that day that OpenAI released ChatGPT. Within a week, the app had been downloaded over a million times.

Much more important, ChatGPT’s rollout instigated the speedy arrival not just of Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google) and Grok (X), but copious investment in artificial intelligence (AI) technology throughout Silicon Valley. And it wasn’t just in Silicon Valley as the arrival of brilliant AIs including DeepSeek’s R-1, Alibaba’s Qwen, and Moonshot’s Kimi indicate.

The investment surge that followed 11/30/22 is a tell that capital is poised to flow to pharmaceutical companies in soaring amounts. That’s because what Moderna and Merck have achieved plainly isn’t the frontier of cancer cures, but the first step of many to follow.

It can’t be said enough that information is wealth. It follows from the previous truth that enormous amounts of wealth are on the verge of being created thanks to the melanoma vaccine discovery.

Assuming an ongoing increase in the valuation of public and private corporations focused on cancer advances, some will throw cold water on the supposed “mania,” or much more simplistically, they'll talk “bubble.” Not only is there no such thing as a “bubble,” that which occupies very simple minds is described as a “growth spasm” by George Gilder.

Gilder has long prized information more than anything else, which is why he puts investment on the top of the proverbial wealth pedestal. So long as live minds are producing knowledge, including myriad failed experiments, progress is on the march born of copious information creation.

Which speaks again to the crucial importance of the advance overseen by Moderna and Merck. Presently it’s 60 cancer vaccines in the works, but the news about an effective melanoma vaccine signals a major multiplication of that number.

Said another way, while Moderna is now a cancer company, it’s not the only new cancer company. Many are set to pivot, and many more are set to form. In the information they’ll soon create will exist all manner of cures.

Originally published on Real Clear Markets.