Curing Cancer Could Be Close

Stéphane Bancel has been CEO of Moderna since 2011, but it’s almost as if he's led three different companies in the past five years.

First came the pandemic sprint: A biotech with no commercial products became a household name, manufacturing a billion vaccine doses in 2021 and generating roughly $18 billion in annual sales. Then, the descent. As demand for COVID shots collapsed, revenue fell roughly 90%, its stock price plunged, and Bancel had to cut thousands of jobs.

Now comes another turn. Positive results from a melanoma trial with Merck have sent Moderna's stock sharply higher over the past couple of months—and offered compelling evidence for the idea Bancel was pursuing before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

Moderna wasn’t built to make one vaccine. It was built around a platform: messenger RNA technology that could be adapted to fight cancer, infectious diseases, and potentially much more. The pandemic made that technology famous. An individualized cancer vaccine could reveal how much further it can go.

In this conversation, Bancel explains what it takes to lead through that whiplash, what he learned from the company’s COVID detour, and what still stands between a promising clinical result and a treatment available to patients.

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