Stephane Bancel, Moderna CEO, and Dr. Dean Li, Merck Research Laboratories president, join 'Squawk Box' to discuss details of an experimental personalized cancer vaccine that showed positive initial results in its first-ever late-stage trial, how the mRNA-based shot in combination with Merck’s immunotherapy Keytruda could serve as a new treatment option for melanoma, and more.
What Stephane Bancel said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Stephane Bancel, CEO of Moderna, discussed the phase three trial results of mRNA-based individualized neoantigen therapy (INT) combined with Merck's Keytruda for melanoma patients. He compared the announcement to the COVID vaccine's phase three results in November 2020, calling it a major moment for medicine. Bancel explained the therapy's mechanism, which involves sequencing a patient's tumor DNA, selecting 34 mutations via an algorithm, and creating a personalized mRNA treatment to train immune cells. He emphasized the safety data from over five years of follow-up and expressed hope for regulatory scrutiny. Bancel highlighted the ten-year development effort and the potential for profound impact on cancer treatment, noting that this is one of several big bets Moderna is making.
Key takeaways
Bancel compared the INT plus Keytruda phase three results to the COVID vaccine's phase three announcement on November 16, 2020, calling it a big moment for medicine.
The therapy is individualized: Moderna sequences a patient's tumor DNA, selects 34 mutations via algorithm, and creates a personalized mRNA treatment.
Bancel said the data from over five years shows the treatment is safe, and he expects FDA and other regulators to scrutinize it.
Bancel described the therapy as training immune cells like hunting dogs to target cancer, with Keytruda unlocking the immune response.
He called this a big bet for Moderna, following mRNA and COVID vaccine development, with more bets to come.
Numbers and commitments
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mutations selected by algorithm for the personalized mRNA treatment
Welcome back, everybody. Shares of Moderna and Merck are surging this morning, and that is no exaggeration. Check it out — shares of Merck right now up by about 7.75%. Of course, before those moves, this was a company with a $333 billion market cap, so that is substantial when you're talking numbers. And then check out shares of Moderna — they are up 63%, a gain of close to $40 right now. The stock is now trading at $102. By the way, before that move, that was a stock with about a $25 billion valuation. So you're probably talking $38 to $40 billion now of valuation in the company today. All of this is because of a phase three study that found the combination of mRNA-based individualized neoantigen therapy, or INT, combined with Merck's Keytruda, reduced the risk of recurrence or death in melanoma patients in phase two and phase three trials that they've been running. Joining us right now for more on this is Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel and Dr. Dean Li, who is the President of Merck Research Laboratories. And gentlemen, welcome to both of you.
Before we talk numbers and markets and the rest of this, let's talk about what this means on the human level. What you found with these studies — increasing survival, and not only increasing survival, but reducing recurrence of cancer for patients who had melanoma that was cut out, and then they were treated at the same time with this gene therapy vaccine. Let's talk about it. Stephane, you've been working on this for a very long time.
Yes, Vicky, thank you for having us. For ten years — I will let my colleague Dean talk about the science; he's the doctor. But basically, the way we think about it, it's like November 16th, 2020, when we announced the phase three of the COVID vaccine. You remember we were on the show that morning. It's a big moment for medicine, a big moment for patients. We believe that this is just a first step for INT plus Keytruda. We're excited about what it's going to mean for patients. Already, just hearing stories from patients in clinical studies has been really heartening. And so I'm very thankful for the team that has worked on this for ten years. That's the type of thing we're trying to do at Moderna — take very big scientific, clinical bets. Look, mRNA was a big bet. COVID, doing a vaccine in a year, was a big bet. This is a big bet with a few more coming, but this one is going to be very, very profoundly impactful. And all of us have been touched by cancer. Many of us have been touched by cancer now in our family or loved ones. And so just what it means for patients is what gets us so excited.
What's exciting about it is you're taking Keytruda, which many people know is a really important cancer drug that's approved in 20 different types of cancers, and if you add this personalized cancer treatment based on the technology of Moderna, and you treat patients with a really deadly disease — melanoma — you reduce that risk of recurrence, which essentially means that patients have a better chance of being disease-free and for longer. And the question will arise as to how long could they be disease-free. So we're going to run this trial out and see. But we have a hint. We did a phase two some years ago, Moderna and Merck, and what we said is after that treatment, after patients were treated, we would look one year how many people were disease-free, three years. And I think the five-year results just were provided out there. And what you saw at five years is that many — I would actually say most — of the patients who were disease-free one year, three years, were disease-free five years. So we don't know if this is going to be seven years, nine years, but there's a chance that you have an increased rate, increased ability to be disease-free, and for a potentially extended period of time.
Tell us the results of these latest phase two and phase three trials, and what that means in the life of a patient versus if they had not had this Keytruda and Merck.
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Bancel, S. (2026, August 19). ‘An increased ability to be disease-free’: Moderna CEO & Merck’s Dr. Li on skin cancer vaccine trial [Interview transcript]. CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1227937/
MLA
Stephane Bancel. "‘An increased ability to be disease-free’: Moderna CEO & Merck’s Dr. Li on skin cancer vaccine trial." CNBC Television, 19 Aug. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1227937/.
BibTeX
@misc{bancel2026_1227937,
author = {Stephane Bancel},
title = {‘An increased ability to be disease-free’: Moderna CEO \& Merck’s Dr. Li on skin cancer vaccine trial},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, CNBC Television. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {aug},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1227937/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
