Technological advances inevitably generate backlash — witness the resistance to covid vaccines and the revolt against data centers. But they also produce life-improving feats that are too miraculous to resent. This week’s triumph of a vaccine to fight skin cancer, jointly produced by Moderna and Merck, offers a ray of hope for people affected by a disease that sickens more than 100,000 Americans annually and kills more than 8,000.
The two U.S. companies announced on Wednesday that their cancer vaccine succeeded in a Phase 3 trial involving more than 1,100 patients, catapulting their stock prices. Details of the results are not yet public, but in 2022, results from a smaller Phase 2 trial showed that the vaccine, combined with an existing immunotherapy drug, reduced the risk of skin cancers returning or death by 44 percent compared with the drug alone.
This week’s results are proof of concept for an approach to cancer treatment that has been under development for decades. The idea is to remove tumors from a patient and sequence their genomes so that scientists can identify the proteins of mutated cells. Those then serve as the basis for a vaccine designed specifically for that individual. The vaccine can train the patient’s immune system to recognize new cancer cells and stop them before they multiply again.
The treatment is a testament to recent advances in genomics, computing — genetic code contains a huge amount of data for computers to process — and mRNA technology that enables the speedy development of personalized therapies.
The power of science often isn’t visible until multiple innovations are layered on top of each other. In the 2000s, each step in the cancer vaccine’s development would have proved technologically insurmountable; the Moderna-Merck trial shows that today, such immunizations can be produced in just six weeks.
Soon enough, scientists will learn whether this strategy can be used against other forms of cancer. Trial data for a vaccine targeting kidney cancer are expected by early 2027. Studies for bladder and lung cancers are also underway.
Three lessons from the breakthrough come to mind. The first is the critical role of market incentives in generating medical advances; markets this week are richly rewarding Moderna and Merck for their accomplishment. The second is the importance of government investment in basic research, which often leads to discoveries with practical benefits that are impossible to predict in academic labs.
The final lesson is the folly of defunding research for ideological reasons. Last year, the White House canceled grants for certain mRNA research because of the Trump administration’s politicized hang-ups about the covid vaccine.
Technological progress has always brought risks as well as rewards, but the risks tend to receive outsize attention. There are few problems that human ingenuity, unleashed by free markets and investment in science, can’t mitigate or solve.
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