8/19: Moderna, Merck mRNA Mogs Melanoma

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Today, Moderna and Merck1 announced an incredible result in cancer treatment. Their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine, intismeran autogene, substantially slowed recurrence of melanoma, the most serious type of skin cancer, in a Phase 3 clinical trial. The trial also showed a reduction in the risk of the cancer spreading to distant parts of the body. Moderna stock nearly tripled, surging 177% on the news. Merck rose 12.6%.

Oncologists often say “cancer is like a snowflake” — there are hundreds of different types, and even patients with the same type of cancer have a unique set of mutations in their particular tumor. Historically, this has made cancer very difficult to treat. Now, doctors can sequence the DNA of a removed tumor and identify “neoantigens”, or mutated proteins that appear in the patient’s cancer cells but not their healthy cells. They then manufacture a custom messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine that tells the patient’s cells to produce these neoantigens. This helps the patient’s T cells, a type of immune system cell, to hunt down and destroy cancer. In combination with Merck’s cancer immunotherapy drug Keytruda (pembrolizumab), it works better than Keytruda alone.

This is a big deal. The first clinical trial testing a neoantigen vaccine was initiated in 1997, and billions of dollars have been spent over decades with little success. This trial is the first Phase 3 success for any individualized neoantigen therapy. It remains to be seen whether intismeran will work for other types of cancer beyond melanoma and how easily it can be scaled. Moderna and Merck have also not published effect sizes, survival times, or full statistical results, which will likely be presented at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress in Madrid on October 23-27. But for now, it looks like another battle has been won in humanity’s millennia-long war against cancer.

• Unitree surges 460% to a $50.8B market cap upon its IPO. The Hangzhou-based company, founded in 2016, is the second-largest seller of humanoid robots in the world. Investors in the IPO included DeepSeek, Tencent, and various state-owned enterprises like China National Petroleum Corp. Its largest competitor, Shanghai AgiBot Innovation Technology, is also preparing to go public.

• Americans are increasingly negative on AI. A Pew poll found that 55% of Americans under 30 are now “more concerned than excited” on AI, compared to just 11% who are “more excited than concerned”. 73% think AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. Dr. Fei-Fei Li, the “godmother of AI”, warned today that public backlash is a major risk for AI, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee wrote an internal memo warning that Democratic candidate Sherrod Brown may win the Ohio Senate race, in a state which Trump won by 11 points, over his opposition to data centers.

• Stripe acquires OpenRouter. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but were rumored to be around $7-8B. OpenRouter is a platform allowing developers to connect to hundreds of AI models through a single endpoint. Stripe said in a statement that it will help businesses optimize their token usage for cost and efficiency.

• Google and Marvell announce a partnership. Marvell, valued at $208 billion, manufactures data center products including custom chips, networking and optical connectivity equipment, storage controllers, rack-scale memory expansion, and more. Marvell will help Google design its TPUs, and Google may invest up to $12.2 billion in Marvell.

• The White House still has not fully briefed AI companies on its AI framework. The framework, completed earlier this month, would encourage AI companies to share their latest models with the government before a public release. OpenAI’s recent training pause was not motivated by government pressure.

• Temporal is raising $500 million at a $12 billion valuation. Temporal, founded in 2019, provides a durable execution platform that ensures code runs to completion even if systems fail in the middle of the task. It raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation in February.

• Cerebras introduces the CS-4, the latest generation of its unified rack-scale platform for AI inference. It claims up to 30x speed improvements over traditional GPUs on specific workloads, as well as the ability to deliver over 1,000 tokens per second on 10T+ models.

• OpenAI enables Zero Data Retention for frontier models for eligible API customers, ensuring that OpenAI will not retain prompts or model responses after a request is processed. Anthropic does not offer zero data retention for its most capable model, Claude Fable 5.

• Chinese startup LandSpace has successfully landed a reusable rocket, making it the fourth entity to do so after SpaceX, Blue Origin, and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation. LandSpace is a private commercial launch provider based in Beijing, founded in 2015.

• Anpaure (AI safety and security researcher, MATS)

• Daniel Litt (Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Toronto)

• Eugenia Kuyda (Founder and CEO, Wabi) and Blas Moros (Head of Growth, Wabi)

• Ruxandra Tesloianu (Writer, Works in Progress and Stripe)

• Nicolas Kopp (Founder and CEO, Rillet)

• solst/ICE (anonymous security engineer)

• Joshua Saxe (Co-founder and CTO, Abundant Security)

• Beyang Liu (Member of Technical Staff, Amp)