Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel said the company was never just about Covid-19 vaccines, and investors appeared to be catching on.
Speaking at Bernstein's annual healthcare conference on Wednesday, Bancel proclaimed that Moderna "has never been" just a Covid vaccine company, but an mRNA platform company. Chief Development Officer David Berman added that the company also was targeting oncology and rare diseases.
The message resonated with Wall Street. Moderna stock rose 1.2% to $184.74 on Wednesday on an overall down day for the stock market. The stock was on pace for its highest close since January 2023, according to Dow Jones Market Data. Shares hit a 52-week high of $192.31 earlier in the session.
Bancel's remarks address one of the key narratives surrounding the shares, and one that Moderna has only just started to distance itself from. The company landed in the spotlight at the height of the pandemic, when it became the second drugmaker to get an approved vaccine to market following Pfizer and BioNTech's Comirnaty.
Covid drove Moderna's first commercial product, Spikevax, which secured emergency use authorization in December 2020. The vaccine received full Food and Drug Administration approval on Jan. 31, 2022.
Shares topped $380 in mid-2021 as Spikevax scaled globally, delivering record revenue for Moderna in the fourth quarter that year. Although the stock remains far below those levels today, fresh optimism has emerged around Moderna's personalized cancer vaccine, intismeran autogene, which is co-developed with Merck.
As Bancel alluded, the vaccine is built on Moderna's flagship mRNA platform. It is engineered to flag dozens of mutations unique to each patient's tumors. Intismeran autogene has been a massive validation of the scrutinized technology: A positive data readout in August caused Moderna shares to nearly triple in a single session.
Implicit in Bancel and Berman's remarks was that Moderna is relying on the vaccine to shift its narrative, using it to reaffirm the potential of its underlying mRNA platform and signal a bold move into oncology. For now, the strategy appears to be working.
The next proof point will be the annual meeting of the European Society for Medical Oncology in late October, where Moderna is set to share expanded data for a trial evaluating intismeran autogene plus Merck's Keytruda as an adjuvant treatment for resected melanoma.
A separate presentation will focus on early-stage trial results for the vaccine following chemotherapy in cancer confined to the small ducts in the pancreas. A third will highlight late-stage trial results for intismeran autogene and immunotherapy for early-stage non-small cell lung cancer.