This is great news! I think people forget how anti-skin cancer protocols even as simple as applying suntan lotion weren't as popular as recent as 50-60 years ago. Lots of "sun children" of the 50s and 60s are now feeling the repercussions of only applying baby oil and are getting hit with lots of melanoma.
What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
Or rather, linked to completely wrong negative health effects that were just “common knowledge” thus requiring no actual evidence like:
People with light skin should always wear a hat that fully covers the head/face in tropical/equatorial climates (okay, good so far) or else the powerful sun rays will penetrate the skull (?) causing brain damage that will make you go insane (!?!?)
Victorians may have inadvertently protected themselves against excess mortality due to melanomas with their pith helmets, but it’s pretty hard to argue they were actually “correct” with modern hindsight considering the entire chain of reasoning was wrong.
(For example, you see this in Kipling’s writing where he’ll randomly include an ominous case of some guy who forgot/lost his hat and promptly had to be committed to an insane asylum, as one does).
Unless you are albino (which is a large set of other problems) being in the sun all day will develop enough of a tan that you won't sunburn. There might be a problem in spring, but by summer time most people will have spent enough time outdoors that they wouldn't sunburn. I've always been the lightest person in town (a tie in Stockholm) and I can spend all day outside without any sunscreen and I won't burn on the parts of my body normally not covered (my arms), but other parts would burn in a few minutes (If I took off my hat or shirt...)
As someone from Britain with Scottish ancestry I don’t really tan at all. The melanin in my skin clumps in freckles, severely limiting its effectiveness at blocking UV. I can spend time outside in a t-shirt during the long summer evenings in Britain/Scandinavia but will burn during the midday sun. Living in California now the sun is stronger for longer so I just cover up.
San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.
This is an illusory statistic because "black people" isn't a real category. People who self-identify as "black" have a wide-range of skin tones. Even a moderate bit of brown completely eliminates the risk of sunburn. You can have two "black" parents and be lighter skinned than the average southern Italian.
I say this from experience. I am a black person who is not particularly dark skinned, and have only had the slightest sunburn once in my life, after I had been working in a field for 16 hours straight in full sun under clear sky detasseling corn. When I got back to camp, the back of my neck seemed slightly sensitive, which was unusual. It was fine the next morning, and never peeled at all. I did the same for 2 weeks, and this was the only time I felt this. This was the worst sunburn (if it was one) that I've gotten in 50 years of life. I've spent plenty of time outside, and plenty of time inside being a code monkey and never going outside. I've never worn sunscreen.
I've never met a black person as brown as a paper bag who ever got a sunburn, at least that I know of. My dad is pretty pale, I think I would have heard about it.
I’m overwhelming white ancestry but with some remnant traces of melanated ancestry (> 1%) and I tan very easily. I’ve been mistaken for hispanic or Black before during the summer. My mom is much darker than me.
We both get sunburns. My even darker grandmother got sunburns. My Black friends get sunburns. I am not sure that you are correctly correlating your experience with actual facts about the sunburn resistance offered by melanin.
As a counterexample, my bestie is "brown as a paper bag", and he was convinced he couldn't get a sunburn, up until he did.
Unrelated, he also swore he couldn't get poison ivy, until he literally rolled in it to prove it to me. I found the aftermath more amusing than he did.
Black people who spend all their time indoors or covered up will get sunburned if they go outside. If that black person gradually increases their sun exposure they can (in a few weeks) reach the point where they can be outside without sunscreen and they will not get sun burned.
Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
Increased melanin provides some protection against burns, but it doesn’t make you immune. There’s also the aspect of UV damage without burns, which is still harmful and is not affected by melanin levels.
that's his point. anyone can get sunburned, and almost anyone can prevent sunburn through gradual exposure. except albinos, who are especially susceptible.
melanin is also not the only factor in preventing sunburn/cancer. there are many repair pathways and genes, which are present to differing levels in various populations.
The same is true for me, a white person of northern European heritage. If I have a few weeks and time to work at building up a tan, I can get to the point where I won't burn. I did this during the pandemic when I was home all day. I would go out and lie in the sun, starting at 15 minutes, turn over, go another 15 minutes, and go back inside. Increased the time as my skin darkened. Felt nice, never burned.
I don't know about that. I'm a fairly tanned individual, but where I live, in Texas, if I spend all day in the sun, I'm getting sunburned bad everywhere.
That "if" makes me understand that spending all day in the sun is not something you normally do. I've been told by others who live in Texas that you can build up tolerance and spend all day in the sun.
Naturally darker skin does not automatically provide sunburn protection. It is spending time in the sun that adds the missing part that provide that protection. I don't know how this differs from dark skin, but I've seen it myself.
Note that my claims are only about sunburn. The article/topic is skin cancer which may well have different factors from sunburn.
Are you paying for my mid life crisis? Otherwise my boss expects me back in the office before I could build up the needed tolerance (I'm expecting this to take a month) such that I'd expect to spend all day in the sun without burning.
They were no dumber then than in 2026, but they fundamentally had much less access to information. How much do you trust the medical advice of an uneducated person in 2026?
"Hm, whom to trust, a person who went to university and follow-on education for nigh a decade, oorrrrrrrrrr.... something someone posted on Facebook that just so happens to confirm what my own ignorance told me was likeliest?"
This is silly.... most of the world didn't live in england.
All cultures (including mine), have a way to warn kids, or adults for not to stay too long in the sun.
From normal sunburn, to feeling light-headenes/fainting due to heat excaustion, etc.
In the winter was the opposite. (stay in the sun to get some sunlight and not get sick).
So, they knew, and had nothing to do with 'class'. Also, they knew some sun was good/beneficial, especially during the winter.
Pale beauty is a phenomenon across geography. What correlation a society works out is largely lost in the cycles of avoiding the sun being a relative luxury until you get expensive air travel.
Again... you are confusing second order effects, with the primary reason.
We have an old saying "te rafte pika e diellit", may you get a spot, sun spot, aka cancer from the Sun.
People knew excessive sun is unhealthy.... if you could you avoid it during the summer. It was not necessary to make you look 'rich'. Ability to avoid it, meant you were rich. And people wanted to be pale, because you look rich, that is a second order effect, that came because of the original reason (aka, too much sun is unhealthy).
The correlation looks right so all people who have rituals like telling their children not to look poor really understand and later communicate the truth? Is this true for religious stigmas related to food too?
I think you are retro analyzing and presuming individual intelligence because this collective result looks right to you. Really, some people understand some risks and many people who can follow taboos they can afford are not exactly sure what they would learn first hand and what part is superstition.
I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg.
I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.
> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.
Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.
In retrospect, I wonder if there was a measurable effect on sun exposure creating vitamin D => immune system recovery, especially if the patient were otherwise not outside much?
Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.
That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on.
Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around.
At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change.
Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.
We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
technically UVB is much more tanning than UVA. UVA tans for a short amount of time. UVA penetrates much deeper into the skin though and has few benefits (UVB stimulates Vitamin D synthesis).
> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.
+1. Also, just to call out, it doesn't need to be _warm_ for you to need sunblock. Even when it's cooler / cloudier out there you can still get skin damage. Look for UV rating rather than temperature. Conversely, it being hot doesn't imply high-UV either.
I didn't know about the UV index or what it meant until like three years ago. It blows my mind I went that long without understanding. It was actually wonderful to learn that I could just see if I needed sunblock based on a 0-10 scale.
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
I think the Apple Watch or the Weather app or something finally taught me UV index about the same time. Has this information always been readily available? Similarly mind blown about it.
This was my experience. Years ago I travelled to New Zealand in what would be their spring time. We stayed in Wanaka but also travelled around Twizel, Tekapo etc.
Although it was pretty sunny with clear blue skies, the air temperature was fairly chilly (shirt, jumper and fleece cold - and I'm Scottish so used to cold weather) and I started to burn. I was warned about this, and the probability of high UV exposure at altitude by the locals and family, and was advised to apply a high factor sunblock whilst roaming around the higher elevations of New Zealand's South Island, which I did.
I got the worst sunburn of my life while skiing in Colorado. I wasn’t wearing goggles or anything on my face, and the sun plus the reflection off the snow was brutal. I didn’t notice it when I was out there, but the next morning I wasn’t able to open my eyes. Lesson learned.
I’ve always wondered about this. I have fair skin, and I tend to burn somewhat easily in very sunny environments like the beach.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
I think the point is just about temperature. I've experienced this out on lakes in the northern US for example. It's sunny but not like a tropical beach, and maybe even a little chilly. But you'll definitely get burnt without sunscreen
People who are new to skiing/snowboarding are often surprised that their faces get sunburned, because of course it's cold and so how could they get burned
My mother always covered up and always made us kids cover up. She still died of melanoma. Sun may increase the risk, but sun cream doesn't make it impossible. Cancer has no friends.
Well done to the drug researchers. I have my fingers crossed someone else gets to avoid this
skin grows/regenerates at a rapid pace, which means mutations (mistakes in DNA replication) are naturally likely to happen there than in slow-growing tissue. skin cells and the immune system are constantly self-surveying and nipping these in the buds, under normal conditions. but there are things that can affect this process.
a recent study of 2 million people in ontario showed that both high-sun and low-sun exposed people had higher risk of melanoma than people with moderate exposure.
another explanation is that as much as you can try to cover up, occasionally you may slip up, and going from extreme low-exposure to intense sun is especially bad, because your repair pathways are not primed, skin is untanned, etc..
in conclusion, extreme low or high sun exposure is bad. at the beginning of the summer you should gradually exposure yourself, and then exposure yourself daily but not overly, for the rest of the year.
there is also that anything that blocks UV (sunscreen, windows, etc) by definition blocks UVB first and then UVA, and UVA is the one that penetrates most deeply and has few benefits
No this is insane news, the world is crazy and dumb. Must be all these LLMs. Stock up more than 150%, based on totally unpublished data and an X post...
- The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial. The phase 2 was open label, had only 50 controls, and its randomization was disrupted. Meaning 9 patients were reassigned and the final 37 were no longer randomized.
Its primary RFS result was p=0.053 two-sided, with the 95% CI crossing 1. It also used an unusually permissive one-sided alpha of 0.10, and much of the later "confirmation" is just longer follow up of those same 157 patients...
- This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release. They have not published hazard ratio, or confidence interval, their event counts or survival curves.
- They met the endpoint as used in the press release means nothing, until they publish the actual 3 data, so my money is at the end this will be a kind of marginal effect that researchers will struggle to reproduce for years
Another type of study that will take 2 to 3 years to validate or dismiss, in the meanwhile stock is up 150%....
150% increase is because it started from a low point. Moderna's stock lost 94% value after Covid. Stock price speaks to investors' enthusiasm, there is no algorithm.
> This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release.
Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong? They do have the data, and most likely the data is positive. They're talking about FDA's approval as soon as late 2027, which is fairly soon.
Do you know what would be more dramatic than stock gaining 150%? that'd be the stock crashing if the press release turned out to be wrong. Follow the money if you are skeptical. See who's selling.
> The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial.
There are 1,100 patients in phase 3. More evidence that they're pretty confident.
>> Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong?
Galera Therapeutics, Actimmune, leronlimab, roxadustat, tivozanib, aducanumab, tebipenem are all examples of Phase 3 massive failures.
>> This is great news.
Looking forward to the stock market reacting with the same level of due diligence show here, when the actual science data is published...in a still not announced distant future... :-)
the stock is up 150% because if Moderna has indeed cured cancer, the stock is worth many magnitudes more than that. It's presumably based on the probability this report is indeed as promising as it is at face value. If Moderna had announced "we are 100% sure cancer is cured" the stock would've gone up much more
These are patients who had melanoma surgically removed, and IF the unpublished data of phase 3 turn out to be true... you are looking at having improved survival rates after 2 to 3 years on 5 to 10% plus of the patients. That is ALL this still unknown announcement MIGHT mean.
For what it's worth, AFAICT Moderna and other such high-tech biopharma stocks are way too sensitive to the news cycle and not nearly enough to scientific fundamentals, so I took the opportunity of having it up 150% to sell mine off.
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
Please be careful and charitable in reading others' words, especially as they relate to scientific topics.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC. It's still a misleading comment, in my opinion.
> Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC.
In a thread about a trial for a melanoma drug, which has nothing to do with the discussion of sunscreen. Sunscreen was brought up because it is a culture-war topic, the fact that melanomas are not as associated with sun exposure was brought up as the standard opposite-side reply to a culture-war topic.
Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
It's fine to see debate, but this is not debate. At most, consistent daily sunscreen use is associated with a 30-50% reduction in melanoma, and some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer.
What would be helpful is a link to a study showing a general reduction in melanomas during a general increase in the use of sunscreen. I'd be able to point that out to friends who questioned me about the efficacy of using it.
edit: that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on. Now to mention this fact has become "bizarre." Can't wait until it becomes "unhinged."
I think the problem is that it takes 30 years for the effects to start showing.
This data [1] shows incidence of melanoma by the age of 30 dropping by half in Australia, presumably as a result of a sun safety campaign that started in the late 80s (not just encouraging sunscreen but also more shade, hats, covering up, etc.). Yet melanoma rates here in general increase but it’s more and more skewed towards the older.
>Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
the comment you are replying to is HedonicEscal8r's first comment in this comment chain.
>that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on
no... it is correcting your comment that is accusing HedonicEscal8r of having multiple comments in this chain. HedonicEscal8r was not the one to make the comment that you describe as an "unrelated accusation" to "silence the other side".
common courtesy would be to say "oops, i didn't read the usernames, my bad" instead of accusing someone else entirely of "trying to snowball into a pile on" for calling you out on the mistake.
pessimizer misattributes a comment to someone who didn't write it. i mention it, get accused of "piling on", and then get downvoted. hn can be so fucking weird.
By pointing out that it is true using a reference?
> the reply
The reply misunderstood the first comment and went on to discuss something a)interesting but b) not germane to whether melanoma is the skin cancer with the highest sun exposure risk.
I have no idea what you mean by context as this small discussion is quite self-contained. Think of this as making sure everyone realizes two homophones actually are distinct words.
Yes, however the trial succeeded. But by "how much", is not yet released. This trial was not against placebo, but the already existing, and effective Keytruda treatment.
My dad died 30 years ago after it spread to his liver. He was in the study at duke for what is today the standard treatment line for immunotherapy. I hope he was able to help. He died 9 months after his diagnosis.
Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.
Immune therapy is hit or miss. Friends lung cancer was exquisitely sensitive to it. Stage 4 to no sign of disease. Another friend with melanoma immune therapy didn't seem to help at all.
Melanoma is usually completely resistant to traditional cancer drugs. So that sometimes immune therapy works is very welcome.
I got my first one at age 27. A third just got removed. Living with the constant mole vigilance of that is rough, but I am glad I've learned to identify them. I think knowing the ABCDEs of it should be more widely spread, as removing a mole is a much nicer alternative to having to take margins in a highly mobile place.
Huge, uplifting, news, hope the study will bear further fruit. Considering that 90% of all clinical trials fail, it's good to read about a truly promising one for once.
Yes, mRNA vaccines are promising for many but not all cancer types, and there are many ongoing clinical trials. There's also a lot we yet don't know about how to design them.
One of the leading problems is that we don't know how to pick the right neoantigens (mutant cancer proteins) which can trigger the optimal immune response.
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
mRNA is a general technique for targeted cancer therapy. It's the message RNA containing the instructions from a gene to create a specific protein. It's much easier to work with, reprogrammed, manufactured, and delivered. There're a number of approaches to use mRNA against cancer cells. One is using cancer related antigens, similar to the vaccine approach. mRNA is programmed to generate the antigen proteins in the body, which are attached to the cancer cells. The body's T-cells can then attack the tagged cancer cells.
The problem now is finding the correct antigens targeting the cancer cell type. Cancer cells are similar to health cells. You don't want to program a mRNA to generate antigen proteins that target health cells, which causes autoimmune problems.
Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment has been revolutionized by the checkpoint inhibitors (as well as some other drugs targeting specific mutations).
I don't like words like "revolutionized" as they set wrong expectations.
For non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (such as pembrolizumab, nivolumab, or atezolizumab), median overall survival typically ranges from about 10 to 20 months in advanced stages as opposed to 10-12 months for standard chemotherapy treatments.
That's great news especially as they would likely be better tolerated. Bt let's please not call living a handful of months longer as a 'revolution'.
> Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Every cancer is different. Immunotherapy is highly effective, even curative, for some cancers. For my cancer, chemotherapy is curative, while other cancer's just shrug chemotherapy off like it's nothing.
Having a plethora of drugs and treatments is vital because cancer is not "one thing". Each type of cancer will respond better to some treatments than others.
Personalized mRNA vaccines are in fact, extremely new, and only made possible by recent advances across multiple fields. This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
I believe the comment was talking specifically about immunotherapy rather than personalized mRNA. But I'd agree it's still misinformed as immunotherapy has been a game changer across multiple cancers.
u/danjl was originally asking about "this class of drugs", which is more reasonably interpreted as referring to personalized mRNA vaccines rather than the much broader concept of (personalized or not) immunotherapy.
The comment is wrong because it's stupid. Just because we've known that personalized immunotherapy was a promising idea for a long time, and have been trying it with the limited tools we had (CAR T being the poster child, and while an incredible advancement for blood cancers and many other diseases, it is notoriously dangerous and expensive), does not mean we had the technology to accomplish it. Today's results are only possible because of recent advancements in multiple fields, and to respond with "they've tried immunotherapy for decades" is profoundly ignorant. You may as well say, "scientists have been trying to cure cancer for years."
> This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
My thoughts as well, Keytruda alone has been a miracle to many many people at this point (quoting GP: "scientists, for decades, have tired [sic] to harness the immune system to attack cancer and it almost never works."), I frequently get ads for local CAR-T centers (unthinkable a little over a decade ago)
Many people, including myself, often take pot-shots at "big pharma." But, this just seems like a win-win, for the org and humanity. They believed in their tech, rode it out, and we all came out the better for it.
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
I mean, the question is almost always about whether it's economical or not, right? Whether you can find diseases it's efficacious to treat with this mechanism, and prove it (trials are expensive).
I think the "expected value" was priced in, but regardless of the result, this trial would move the stock price towards that direction.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
Even if you were to optimally price in all available information you still have uncertainty of what will actually happen. i.e. A 1 dollar coin flip has an expected value of 50c before it’s thrown and it will collapse either to zero or to one after the uncertainty is resolved.
It was priced in, the share price prior to the news being released was taking into account a probability measurement of the trial succeeding or failing. You can’t price in both options of a binary outcome simultaneously, so part of the equity price was functionally equivalent to a call option on the outcome of the drug trial that only resolved after the trial results are announced.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
I wish people would find a decent source for these stories in order to post them on here instead of sending us to a tweet. I'm not on Twitterx and it's a mini nightmare on a mobile browser
Ever since I first heard of them a decade ago, it seemed that mRNA therapeutic vaccines were going to be the next wave of massive improvements in care. It's taken a bit longer than I had expected, and it's not that mRNA is the only way to make these sorts of vaccines, it's just so much better than the alternatives.
My father has gastric melonama and pretty much last few days left — does someone with knowledge know if this vaccine can be of any help? Or any registry available?
Deepest sympathies, and I'm no oncologist - but I think that'd be like trying to patch the hull of the Titanic after her stern has lifted out of the water. So many cascading failures are in motion by then that saving him really isn't possible.
>Postscript: Our Secretary of Health and Human Services of course cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine R&D contracts (22 different programs) last year, and cited a pile of misinformation (and cluelessly misunderstood research citations) to justify it. Our Director of the National Institutes of Health was apparently just fine with this decision and cited mRNA vaccines’ alleged failure to “earn public trust” as one of his reasons, along with public statements that “the mRNA platform is no longer viable”. I have a number of suggestions for each of these individuals and their supporters about how they might spend the rest of their day, and will be glad to send details if they contact me.
According to Gemini, Moderna uses machine learning to speed up sequence selection and mRNA optimization. After all, this is not a mass-produced vaccine, but a personalized one.
I for one would like to see the data rather than a press release. Is this even serious? A press release with no link to outside twitter?
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.
Sorry--I was unclear. I was specifically responding to the OP's "CEOs these days want to join the AI hype wave" claim. My point was that the "hype wave" OP is referencing is really about deep learning, not what we think of as traditional statistical learning. Even the dedicated medical AI startups of that era, like BenevolentAI, were still doing traditional ML in 2014. So if Moderna really was trying to join the "AI hype train" and announce a deep learning result with this treatment, they'd be announcing that they successfully trained a deep neural network for drug discovery 12 years ago.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
I was not pointing to PFS as OS.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
I did not say it was. I said it was written FOR AI trading algorithms to read and invest on.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
Someone noted this was an earlier study. The newest study does not even have data out and yet here we are, investing on a press release.
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
You are talking to someone whose father died of pancreatic cancer. "Pancreatic cancer has a higher mortality rate compared to melanoma, with an estimated 52,740 deaths from pancreatic cancer in 2026, while melanoma has a significantly lower death rate. Additionally, the 5-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer is only 13.7%, compared to higher survival rates for melanoma."
What they did for my father was worse than nothing.
Yes every cancer is different, responds to different therapy, and with different survival rates. However, cancer treatment, as a whole, works. Oncologists do not prescribe incredibly intense treatments like chemotherapy out of nowhere. Chemotherapy is often not curative. Instead, it's used to both prolong life and improve quality of life.
Dying from late-stage cancer is often painful and miserable. It might be shocking, but getting just a few more months from chemo can provide a greater quality of life. Keyword can. Every oncologist is different with different recommendations, and they explain the risks very concretely. There is always an option to refuse treatment, but bear in mind it's not just about how quick you die. It's also about how much that dying sucks.
They told my father Chemo woudl add six months on his six month estimated lifespan. He died in two months cause the chemo blocked his liver. My sister in law was a chemo nurse and begged him not to get it. He died on loads of morphine. His last words were "It's all a scam!"
Talk to a chemo nurse? I've gotten two different chemo regimens. Yes, I know chemo has a risk because all medicine has a risk. I'm sorry for what happened to your father, but that doesn't fucking mean chemo is a scam. It saves lives, I should know.
A friend's sister beat colon cancer over ten years ago but now is having liver problems that took a while to pin down. They warned her she'd probably die in a couple years from the cancer without Chemo, but would have this risk long term and it recently showed up.
No it isn’t. They did a test with great specificity and got undeniable P values. Now they can refine the action and start saving people. This is a huge, huge win.
you're also looking at a different, older study. Keytruda is a little strange in that it has a very long tail in survivorship, works best in certain cases, and median PFS isn't a really great metric.
So they added $30B market cap for a drug that would do by my napkin estimate about ~$7B average annual sales for 20 years as a front line treatment. Based on that alone, $30B in added market cap isn't enough. How much would you pay for $150B in high margin revenue?
But even more is the validation of this new custom MRNA novel cancer treating platform. If you take this data result to be a 'proof of concept', the expected value of the rest of their pipeline is suddenly worth a lot more.
Of course, this is all assuming the data is accurate and the drug gets approved, neither of which are 100% guaranteed.
In other news, your barber thinks you need a haircut.
Until there is a proven net overall health benefit to this therapy, I wouldn't waste much ink on it. Also, can someone please tell me how one controls the dose for an mRNA therapy ?
If you actually had melanoma (a very aggressive type of skin cancer) you would be glad for one more chance of maybe still being alive a few years from now.
Cancer treatment is different. We have a high tolerance for side effects because many cancers are aggressive and deadly. It's a risk-analysis. If your odds of dying from cancer in the next year are 50%, and the drugs have a 25% chance of killing you, then the drugs are worth it.
In actuality, even extremely aggressive therapies like high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell transplant have shockingly low risk of death. Less than 5%. Bear in mind, that's for a therapy that literally wipes out all of your bone marrow. You know, the part of your body that produces your blood? Your body stops making blood and your immune system. And yet, we've gotten the death rate as low as it is.
See my comments below on Vioxx - even the manufacturers admitted covid shots caused myocarditis in young men - why are you so sure this new therapy won't cause the same issues, or worse ?
Covid itself has a higher risk of myocarditis than the covid vaccine.
And even if it did, it doesn't matter. You didn't read my comment at all. There are cancer treatments which can kill you outright, I know because I've received them. I think maybe you don't understand what cancer is. We can be very aggressive with the treatments. We have much, much bigger fish to fry than a small risk of myocarditis.
As there is no safety data available on this new drug, what makes you say it is safe ? Pre 2020 it took an average of 10 years to release a new vaccine - why do you think it took that long ?
Radiation dose, for example, is precisely measured - we know exactly how much radiation the body is exposed to during therapy. mRNA products work by making our cells produce the desired protein/drug. There is no way of controlling how many cells are producing the drug and for how long they are producing it - ergo there is no way of controlling the dose. I hate to break it to you but they have found people producing spike protein over 3 years after getting the covid shot.
This is great news! I think people forget how anti-skin cancer protocols even as simple as applying suntan lotion weren't as popular as recent as 50-60 years ago. Lots of "sun children" of the 50s and 60s are now feeling the repercussions of only applying baby oil and are getting hit with lots of melanoma.
What’s funny is before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
Laura Ingalls Wilder of Little House fame (I mention this a lot as I read these to my children as an adult, and they’re a fascinating look at 1880s America) has lots of places where her mother says “put on your bonnet! Don’t get too much sun!”. We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant, all of Chesterton’s fences were torn down during that time period.
No I think you’re looking at this wrong.
They thought too much sun was bad for you because back then tanned skin was considering a mark of being poor and pale skin was a mark of being wealthy since rich people didn’t have to work outside.
They also had puritanical Victorian notions of modesty and covering up.
There was no knowledge linking sun exposure to cancer or negative health effects. People in the past indeed were ignorant on many things.
Or rather, linked to completely wrong negative health effects that were just “common knowledge” thus requiring no actual evidence like:
People with light skin should always wear a hat that fully covers the head/face in tropical/equatorial climates (okay, good so far) or else the powerful sun rays will penetrate the skull (?) causing brain damage that will make you go insane (!?!?)
Victorians may have inadvertently protected themselves against excess mortality due to melanomas with their pith helmets, but it’s pretty hard to argue they were actually “correct” with modern hindsight considering the entire chain of reasoning was wrong.
(For example, you see this in Kipling’s writing where he’ll randomly include an ominous case of some guy who forgot/lost his hat and promptly had to be committed to an insane asylum, as one does).
They were too busy dying from typhoid, cholera, "consumption" (TB + other lung diseases) and probably lung cancer caused by all the coal / asbestos.
Only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Dogs_and_Englishmen_(song)
Pretty sure a bad sunburn sucked back then as much as now, and was something one tried to avoid.
Unless you are albino (which is a large set of other problems) being in the sun all day will develop enough of a tan that you won't sunburn. There might be a problem in spring, but by summer time most people will have spent enough time outdoors that they wouldn't sunburn. I've always been the lightest person in town (a tie in Stockholm) and I can spend all day outside without any sunscreen and I won't burn on the parts of my body normally not covered (my arms), but other parts would burn in a few minutes (If I took off my hat or shirt...)
It's bizarre that you cite being outside at 60 degrees latitude as evidence related to high UV exposure.
That's like a resident of Porto saying most people don't get frostbite walking around outside in winter...
I've been outside at lots of different latitudes. I don't live in Stockholm, but I've been there.
As someone from Britain with Scottish ancestry I don’t really tan at all. The melanin in my skin clumps in freckles, severely limiting its effectiveness at blocking UV. I can spend time outside in a t-shirt during the long summer evenings in Britain/Scandinavia but will burn during the midday sun. Living in California now the sun is stronger for longer so I just cover up.
San Francisco is at a southern European latitude. It’s a lot worse in the tropics.
The same thing happens to me - I call it a low-res tan because it's all pixelated.
I don’t think this is correct, Black people still get sunburns
This is an illusory statistic because "black people" isn't a real category. People who self-identify as "black" have a wide-range of skin tones. Even a moderate bit of brown completely eliminates the risk of sunburn. You can have two "black" parents and be lighter skinned than the average southern Italian.
I say this from experience. I am a black person who is not particularly dark skinned, and have only had the slightest sunburn once in my life, after I had been working in a field for 16 hours straight in full sun under clear sky detasseling corn. When I got back to camp, the back of my neck seemed slightly sensitive, which was unusual. It was fine the next morning, and never peeled at all. I did the same for 2 weeks, and this was the only time I felt this. This was the worst sunburn (if it was one) that I've gotten in 50 years of life. I've spent plenty of time outside, and plenty of time inside being a code monkey and never going outside. I've never worn sunscreen.
I've never met a black person as brown as a paper bag who ever got a sunburn, at least that I know of. My dad is pretty pale, I think I would have heard about it.
I’m overwhelming white ancestry but with some remnant traces of melanated ancestry (> 1%) and I tan very easily. I’ve been mistaken for hispanic or Black before during the summer. My mom is much darker than me.
We both get sunburns. My even darker grandmother got sunburns. My Black friends get sunburns. I am not sure that you are correctly correlating your experience with actual facts about the sunburn resistance offered by melanin.
As a counterexample, my bestie is "brown as a paper bag", and he was convinced he couldn't get a sunburn, up until he did.
Unrelated, he also swore he couldn't get poison ivy, until he literally rolled in it to prove it to me. I found the aftermath more amusing than he did.
Sensitivity to poison ivy can change over time. Your friend may have been correct about his past experience.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm07672313/index....
It was explained to me that there are people who react to it, and people who don’t react to it yet.
Black people who spend all their time indoors or covered up will get sunburned if they go outside. If that black person gradually increases their sun exposure they can (in a few weeks) reach the point where they can be outside without sunscreen and they will not get sun burned.
Note that I'm making no claims on how natural sunburn resistant affects skin cancer.
Increased melanin provides some protection against burns, but it doesn’t make you immune. There’s also the aspect of UV damage without burns, which is still harmful and is not affected by melanin levels.
that's his point. anyone can get sunburned, and almost anyone can prevent sunburn through gradual exposure. except albinos, who are especially susceptible.
melanin is also not the only factor in preventing sunburn/cancer. there are many repair pathways and genes, which are present to differing levels in various populations.
The same is true for me, a white person of northern European heritage. If I have a few weeks and time to work at building up a tan, I can get to the point where I won't burn. I did this during the pandemic when I was home all day. I would go out and lie in the sun, starting at 15 minutes, turn over, go another 15 minutes, and go back inside. Increased the time as my skin darkened. Felt nice, never burned.
I don't know about that. I'm a fairly tanned individual, but where I live, in Texas, if I spend all day in the sun, I'm getting sunburned bad everywhere.
That "if" makes me understand that spending all day in the sun is not something you normally do. I've been told by others who live in Texas that you can build up tolerance and spend all day in the sun.
Naturally darker skin does not automatically provide sunburn protection. It is spending time in the sun that adds the missing part that provide that protection. I don't know how this differs from dark skin, but I've seen it myself.
Note that my claims are only about sunburn. The article/topic is skin cancer which may well have different factors from sunburn.
Fascinating. Now come and try that on the Arabian peninsula and see how you get on
Are you paying for my mid life crisis? Otherwise my boss expects me back in the office before I could build up the needed tolerance (I'm expecting this to take a month) such that I'd expect to spend all day in the sun without burning.
That's the thing about traditions and Chesterton's fences, you don't need to know why they work for them to work.
People were aware of heatstroke and sunstroke before the Victorians. There's biblical references to heatstroke and even in Roman and Greek texts.
Still very much the case in East Asia.
The idea that humans were basically retarded prior to about 1901 is a little hubristic
They were no dumber then than in 2026, but they fundamentally had much less access to information. How much do you trust the medical advice of an uneducated person in 2026?
actually depends on the age and life experience of the advisor - if it's an old woman I'd be inclined to listen to what she may want to say.
A young MD full of himself? I may be a bit sceptical about his know-it-all attitude.
How much do you trust the medical advice of a doctor in 2026?
how is that remotely comparable?
"Hm, whom to trust, a person who went to university and follow-on education for nigh a decade, oorrrrrrrrrr.... something someone posted on Facebook that just so happens to confirm what my own ignorance told me was likeliest?"
This is silly.... most of the world didn't live in england.
All cultures (including mine), have a way to warn kids, or adults for not to stay too long in the sun. From normal sunburn, to feeling light-headenes/fainting due to heat excaustion, etc.
In the winter was the opposite. (stay in the sun to get some sunlight and not get sick).
So, they knew, and had nothing to do with 'class'. Also, they knew some sun was good/beneficial, especially during the winter.
Pale beauty is a phenomenon across geography. What correlation a society works out is largely lost in the cycles of avoiding the sun being a relative luxury until you get expensive air travel.
Again... you are confusing second order effects, with the primary reason.
We have an old saying "te rafte pika e diellit", may you get a spot, sun spot, aka cancer from the Sun.
People knew excessive sun is unhealthy.... if you could you avoid it during the summer. It was not necessary to make you look 'rich'. Ability to avoid it, meant you were rich. And people wanted to be pale, because you look rich, that is a second order effect, that came because of the original reason (aka, too much sun is unhealthy).
The correlation looks right so all people who have rituals like telling their children not to look poor really understand and later communicate the truth? Is this true for religious stigmas related to food too?
I think you are retro analyzing and presuming individual intelligence because this collective result looks right to you. Really, some people understand some risks and many people who can follow taboos they can afford are not exactly sure what they would learn first hand and what part is superstition.
I don't think that was because of UV exposure or anything related. Look at Bedouin tribes even today. They wrap up head to toe, man and woman and child alike, not to avoid tanning but because prolonged exposure to direct infrared will fry you like an egg.
I grew up in the same general region as Wilder, and we sought shade not to avoid sunburn. We were all chestnut brown by the end of summer anyway. It's because the direct sunlight on an August afternoon was brutally hot, and you wanted as little of it to hit your skin as possible.
Bedouins are literally being chargrilled from both sides, the worse sun on Earth and a mostly perfectly infrared accumulator below them
> before the 50s and 60s everyone knew you should cover up and women wore bonnets. That too much sun was bad for you.
I'd say partly true, mostly false. As sibling comment mentions, much of this was driven by fashion and class etc. and not from some fundamental understanding of damaging UV exposure.
Furthermore there was research that was trendy at the time called "heliotherapy" [0] where all sorts of diseases were believed curable by sun exposure, including smallpox, TB, etc.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_therapy#History
In retrospect, I wonder if there was a measurable effect on sun exposure creating vitamin D => immune system recovery, especially if the patient were otherwise not outside much?
Like, I doubt that fixing a vitamin D deficiency is going to cure you of smallpox or TB, but could imagine a path where it helped at least.
When I got chickenpox in the 80s my grandma made me sit out in the sun to heal it faster. Heliotherapy lives on!
That's the right thing for the wrong reason, which can actually significantly forestall figuring out what's actually going on.
Scurvy is like that. They figured out that if you give sailors a ration of fresh fruit juice they don't get scurvy - this works because the fresh fruit juice has Vitamin C and Scurvy is just Vitamin C deficiency. But they didn't know why it worked - why would a cow, a mango, a lettuce, and indeed basically everything else have a chemical in it that humans can't synthesize ? That's crazy. Except, nope, that's really what's going on. At some point an ancestor deleted the synthesis pathway for this chemical, their offspring weren't bothered because fresh literally everything has the chemical anyway, so the deletion stuck around.
At the same time ships get quite a lot faster, travel across the Atlantic is now rapid enough that even if you deliberately abstained from Vitamin C you wouldn't get scurvy, your body hoards many chemicals it needs (a few must be made "fresh" but most can be hoarded) and only develops issues when the hoarded ascorbic acid is exhausted after a few weeks. But they don't know that, and so when they swap a working solution (store fruit, squeeze the juice out, drink fresh juice) for a non-working solution (squeeze the juice, preserve that, drink preserved juice) the apparent results do not change.
Until they do something more extreme. Go to Antarctica, which is incredibly hostile to life anyway, and then stay there for months. Despite your magic preserved fruit juice you get scurvy. The juice wasn't magic, and eventually you will figure out it was the freshness which was magic and from there that there really is a chemical found in cows, mango, lettuce and basically everything alive which we cannot synthesize. Ascorbic acid, Vitamin C.
We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer. A lot of the ads from 70s and 80s talked about how they stopped UVB but let the tanning UVA through! So yes, they didn't burn, but the long term cancer rates exploded, along with all the skin aging.
So it's not that they ignored the all knowledge. I blame most of it on the rather detrimental tech advancement. Like cigarettes with filters: now safer (except you can smoke more now, and the cancer risk is still a disaster)
> We developed creams that stopped sunburn, but were still great at getting you cancer.
I thought you were going to talk about the ingredients in the cream were carcinogenic themself.
technically UVB is much more tanning than UVA. UVA tans for a short amount of time. UVA penetrates much deeper into the skin though and has few benefits (UVB stimulates Vitamin D synthesis).
> We act like people in the past were ignorant but people in the 50s and 60s were just a very special type of arrogant,
I’d be curious to know if tetraethyllead in gasoline has anything to do with people from that time being cavalier about exposure to the sun, or if the science was just not there to make the connection between sun exposure and skin cancer.
In many places covering up is just not enough because of Rayleigh scattering. I don't think this vaccine eliminates need for sunscreen. You'd still feel extremely uncomfortable/pain after 15 minutes in places like Australia even if you don't get melanoma.
Everybody who's not been raised in a bubble knows the sun burns
It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"
> It's only recently that we had space for completely retarded ideas like "staying in the sun doesn't hurt you" or "sunscreen causes cancer"
but, what if staying in the sun isn't binary?
and, what if everyday products did cause cancer? https://www.health.harvard.edu/cancer/cancer-concerns-from-e...
the idea that any amount of sun is bad for you is what is retarded
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4
https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
+1. Also, just to call out, it doesn't need to be _warm_ for you to need sunblock. Even when it's cooler / cloudier out there you can still get skin damage. Look for UV rating rather than temperature. Conversely, it being hot doesn't imply high-UV either.
I didn't know about the UV index or what it meant until like three years ago. It blows my mind I went that long without understanding. It was actually wonderful to learn that I could just see if I needed sunblock based on a 0-10 scale.
We never wore sunscreen as kids because we didn't burn. I probably have had three sunburns in my life. Learned once I became an adult that that wasn't sound logic...
I think the Apple Watch or the Weather app or something finally taught me UV index about the same time. Has this information always been readily available? Similarly mind blown about it.
In Australia in at least the 00s, possibly the 90s, I remember it being reported during the weather forecast on the 6pm nightly news.
But Australia has always had a famously robust sun health education programme
This was my experience. Years ago I travelled to New Zealand in what would be their spring time. We stayed in Wanaka but also travelled around Twizel, Tekapo etc.
Although it was pretty sunny with clear blue skies, the air temperature was fairly chilly (shirt, jumper and fleece cold - and I'm Scottish so used to cold weather) and I started to burn. I was warned about this, and the probability of high UV exposure at altitude by the locals and family, and was advised to apply a high factor sunblock whilst roaming around the higher elevations of New Zealand's South Island, which I did.
I got the worst sunburn of my life while skiing in Colorado. I wasn’t wearing goggles or anything on my face, and the sun plus the reflection off the snow was brutal. I didn’t notice it when I was out there, but the next morning I wasn’t able to open my eyes. Lesson learned.
I’ve always wondered about this. I have fair skin, and I tend to burn somewhat easily in very sunny environments like the beach.
However, I’ve never gotten so much as a whisper of sunburn / suntan / anything on an actually cloudy day where sun wasn’t hitting me directly. Is the damage a different type that’s imperceptible? Or is this a public health comms strategy where they assume people will see a single cloud in the sky and decide it’s fine to skip sunscreen, so they talk about how you should slather yourself with sunscreen 24/7, even if the sun is obscured?
The damaging part of sunlight is the UV (Ultraviolet) spectrum. This penetrates clouds more easily than the visible-spectrum light.
So sun obscured != low UV. It will block some of it though.
Or your behavior is different on a cloudy day? More covered in clothes, not sitting still in the sun at the beach all day etc.
I’ve gotten visibly sunburned on cloudy/foggy days, where it was completely overcast. You may have gotten lucky.
IIRC, certain types of hazy high clouds can actually make the UV exposure worse. Personally, I got the worst sunburn of my life on a cloudy day.
I think the point is just about temperature. I've experienced this out on lakes in the northern US for example. It's sunny but not like a tropical beach, and maybe even a little chilly. But you'll definitely get burnt without sunscreen
People who are new to skiing/snowboarding are often surprised that their faces get sunburned, because of course it's cold and so how could they get burned
And snow makes it worse by reflecting.
Geography has a lot to do with it as well. Proximity to the equator, altitude, etc.
My mother always covered up and always made us kids cover up. She still died of melanoma. Sun may increase the risk, but sun cream doesn't make it impossible. Cancer has no friends.
Well done to the drug researchers. I have my fingers crossed someone else gets to avoid this
skin grows/regenerates at a rapid pace, which means mutations (mistakes in DNA replication) are naturally likely to happen there than in slow-growing tissue. skin cells and the immune system are constantly self-surveying and nipping these in the buds, under normal conditions. but there are things that can affect this process.
a recent study of 2 million people in ontario showed that both high-sun and low-sun exposed people had higher risk of melanoma than people with moderate exposure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-48477-4
https://imgur.com/a/site-specific-melanoma-risk-by-occupatio...
a possible explanation is that UV light stimulates repair pathways within the skin, which boosts the baseline level of repair.
Enhancement of UVB-induced DNA damage repair after a chronic low-dose UVB pre-stimulation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S15687...
another explanation is that as much as you can try to cover up, occasionally you may slip up, and going from extreme low-exposure to intense sun is especially bad, because your repair pathways are not primed, skin is untanned, etc..
in conclusion, extreme low or high sun exposure is bad. at the beginning of the summer you should gradually exposure yourself, and then exposure yourself daily but not overly, for the rest of the year.
There's also the effect that sunscreen makes you spend more time in the sun than if you didn't use sunscreen because you think you're "protected".
You are saying that, even if you wear sunscreen and avoid sun burn, the UV exposure will still potentially lead to skin cancer?
I'd like to see the primary research backing that up. Or be told how I misinterpreted your statement.
Yes, 100%. It's the same reason that my kids are able to tan through the same sunscreen application regimen that leaves me pale.
Source: My Mohs surgeon. And 3 skin cancer surgeries (so far).
there is also that anything that blocks UV (sunscreen, windows, etc) by definition blocks UVB first and then UVA, and UVA is the one that penetrates most deeply and has few benefits
My parents were nudists. So I spent a bunch of 60s % 70s getting sunburn. I bet that even baby oil would have cut some of that down.
>> This is great news...
No this is insane news, the world is crazy and dumb. Must be all these LLMs. Stock up more than 150%, based on totally unpublished data and an X post...
- The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial. The phase 2 was open label, had only 50 controls, and its randomization was disrupted. Meaning 9 patients were reassigned and the final 37 were no longer randomized. Its primary RFS result was p=0.053 two-sided, with the 95% CI crossing 1. It also used an unusually permissive one-sided alpha of 0.10, and much of the later "confirmation" is just longer follow up of those same 157 patients...
- This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release. They have not published hazard ratio, or confidence interval, their event counts or survival curves.
- They met the endpoint as used in the press release means nothing, until they publish the actual 3 data, so my money is at the end this will be a kind of marginal effect that researchers will struggle to reproduce for years
Another type of study that will take 2 to 3 years to validate or dismiss, in the meanwhile stock is up 150%....
150% increase is because it started from a low point. Moderna's stock lost 94% value after Covid. Stock price speaks to investors' enthusiasm, there is no algorithm.
> This phase 3 news so far is nothing more than a press release.
Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong? They do have the data, and most likely the data is positive. They're talking about FDA's approval as soon as late 2027, which is fairly soon.
Do you know what would be more dramatic than stock gaining 150%? that'd be the stock crashing if the press release turned out to be wrong. Follow the money if you are skeptical. See who's selling.
> The flashy 49% figures are from the old 157 only patient Phase 2, not this Phase 3 trial.
There are 1,100 patients in phase 3. More evidence that they're pretty confident.
This is great news.
>> Can you find a case where a press release after phase 3 was later proven wrong?
Galera Therapeutics, Actimmune, leronlimab, roxadustat, tivozanib, aducanumab, tebipenem are all examples of Phase 3 massive failures.
>> This is great news.
Looking forward to the stock market reacting with the same level of due diligence show here, when the actual science data is published...in a still not announced distant future... :-)
the stock is up 150% because if Moderna has indeed cured cancer, the stock is worth many magnitudes more than that. It's presumably based on the probability this report is indeed as promising as it is at face value. If Moderna had announced "we are 100% sure cancer is cured" the stock would've gone up much more
Nobody is talking about curing cancer here.
These are patients who had melanoma surgically removed, and IF the unpublished data of phase 3 turn out to be true... you are looking at having improved survival rates after 2 to 3 years on 5 to 10% plus of the patients. That is ALL this still unknown announcement MIGHT mean.
I was being hyperbolic, but reading the comment back it doesn't really come across that way.
For what it's worth, AFAICT Moderna and other such high-tech biopharma stocks are way too sensitive to the news cycle and not nearly enough to scientific fundamentals, so I took the opportunity of having it up 150% to sell mine off.
melanoma , unlike the others, has a much weaker link to sun exposure. its why melanoma often appear in areas with no sun exposure
Misleading comment.
From https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ijc.35463
> Cutaneous melanoma (CM) accounted for around 331,700 cancer cases globally in 2022
> An estimated 267,353 (95% uncertainty intervals [UI]: 242,818, 278,638) CM cases were UVR attributable globally in 2022
UVR = Ultraviolet radiation
Cutaneous melanoma (CM) is the vast majority of melanoma cases in the US at least:
> The percentages of melanomas that were cutaneous, ocular, mucosal, and unknown primaries were 91.2%, 5.2%, 1.3%, and 2.2%, from https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9781962/
tl;dr ~80% of Cutaneous melanoma cases are attributable to UV exposure.
Please be careful and charitable in reading others' words, especially as they relate to scientific topics.
OP did not say that melanoma has no sun exposure risk but that it is lower than the risks associated with other cutaneous cancers (e.g., SCC and BCC) and it would seem that's true based on the very short search I performed.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5742376/
Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC. It's still a misleading comment, in my opinion.
> Yes, but OP said that in response to a comment attributing melanoma to sun exposure, in a conversation where nobody had brought up SCC or BCC.
In a thread about a trial for a melanoma drug, which has nothing to do with the discussion of sunscreen. Sunscreen was brought up because it is a culture-war topic, the fact that melanomas are not as associated with sun exposure was brought up as the standard opposite-side reply to a culture-war topic.
Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
It's fine to see debate, but this is not debate. At most, consistent daily sunscreen use is associated with a 30-50% reduction in melanoma, and some of the ingredients in US sunscreens are themselves associated with cancer.
What would be helpful is a link to a study showing a general reduction in melanomas during a general increase in the use of sunscreen. I'd be able to point that out to friends who questioned me about the efficacy of using it.
edit: that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on. Now to mention this fact has become "bizarre." Can't wait until it becomes "unhinged."
I think the problem is that it takes 30 years for the effects to start showing.
This data [1] shows incidence of melanoma by the age of 30 dropping by half in Australia, presumably as a result of a sun safety campaign that started in the late 80s (not just encouraging sunscreen but also more shade, hats, covering up, etc.). Yet melanoma rates here in general increase but it’s more and more skewed towards the older.
1. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/cancer/cancer-data-in-austra...
>Clearly your unrelated accusation was brought up to silence the other side and accuse them of dishonesty. Your follow-up is to accuse them of some conversational violation (mentioning something that wasn't brought up) which doesn't exist.
the comment you are replying to is HedonicEscal8r's first comment in this comment chain.
>that one sentence reply is already trying to snowball into a pile on
no... it is correcting your comment that is accusing HedonicEscal8r of having multiple comments in this chain. HedonicEscal8r was not the one to make the comment that you describe as an "unrelated accusation" to "silence the other side".
common courtesy would be to say "oops, i didn't read the usernames, my bad" instead of accusing someone else entirely of "trying to snowball into a pile on" for calling you out on the mistake.
pessimizer misattributes a comment to someone who didn't write it. i mention it, get accused of "piling on", and then get downvoted. hn can be so fucking weird.
The criticism and correction were polite, helpful, and appropriate.
The original comment is misleading. Your reply is bizarre, and seems to deliberately misread the original comment, the reply, and the context.
The criticism was both impolite and against HN rules.
The reply was reiterating HN rules, as well as adding data supporting the original statement.
> misread the original comment
By pointing out that it is true using a reference?
> the reply
The reply misunderstood the first comment and went on to discuss something a)interesting but b) not germane to whether melanoma is the skin cancer with the highest sun exposure risk.
I have no idea what you mean by context as this small discussion is quite self-contained. Think of this as making sure everyone realizes two homophones actually are distinct words.
I knew HN was geriatric, but damn
Substantially better link:
https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-moderna-announce-phase-...
Still no actual Phase 3 data presented.
Yes, however the trial succeeded. But by "how much", is not yet released. This trial was not against placebo, but the already existing, and effective Keytruda treatment.
I believe both were done with Keytruda. Control was Keytruda without the mRNA treatment.
So this should answer the question of "how much better is this with the best we currently have".
We're in the dark ages of "effective" at the moment. But now we're starting to get there.
This content is geo/IP fenced
Hope this helps:
https://archive.ph/SQQ97
My father is currently dying of malignant melanoma with brain metastasis...
I wish this treatment was available a few years ago.
My dad died 30 years ago after it spread to his liver. He was in the study at duke for what is today the standard treatment line for immunotherapy. I hope he was able to help. He died 9 months after his diagnosis.
Enjoy the time you have with him now and be grateful for all the years you've had. Nothing is going to make the loss of a parent "OK" and it will hurt no matter if you see it coming like you are or it's a surprise.
Remember to breathe.
Immune therapy didn't help? Darn.
Immune therapy is hit or miss. Friends lung cancer was exquisitely sensitive to it. Stage 4 to no sign of disease. Another friend with melanoma immune therapy didn't seem to help at all.
Melanoma is usually completely resistant to traditional cancer drugs. So that sometimes immune therapy works is very welcome.
That is devastating. How are you doing?
I'm so sorry to hear that, but thank you for sharing your story to highlight the importance of this!
I got my first one at age 27. A third just got removed. Living with the constant mole vigilance of that is rough, but I am glad I've learned to identify them. I think knowing the ABCDEs of it should be more widely spread, as removing a mole is a much nicer alternative to having to take margins in a highly mobile place.
Agreed. As a reminder here are the ABCDE arguments to get extra worried about a mole.
Asymetrical (shape of the mole)
Border (irregular? Unclear delimitation?)
Color (has it multiple colors?)
Diameter (has it a >6mm diameter? An indicator that it might start vertical growth iirc)
Evolution (has it changed recently?)
Huge, uplifting, news, hope the study will bear further fruit. Considering that 90% of all clinical trials fail, it's good to read about a truly promising one for once.
Will this targeted approach be beneficial to other cancer types? Is there any data or theory about this class of drugs as a more general therapy?
Yes, mRNA vaccines are promising for many but not all cancer types, and there are many ongoing clinical trials. There's also a lot we yet don't know about how to design them.
Here's a great blog post on this, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time": https://www.owlposting.com/p/how-to-build-a-cancer-vaccine-a...
Here's the blog post I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines: https://hedonicescalator.substack.com/p/did-paul-conyngham-r...
One of the leading problems is that we don't know how to pick the right neoantigens (mutant cancer proteins) which can trigger the optimal immune response.
Moderna used a simple heuristic, "how likely is this antigen to show up on the cell surface?" which makes sense, since an antigen has to show up on the cell surface for the immune system to see it. But there's so much missing from this model, and we just don't have enough data. Failures in clinical trials of mRNA vaccines may well be caused by this problem. (Yes, this is a good problem for AI, if we can get enough data).
mRNA is a general technique for targeted cancer therapy. It's the message RNA containing the instructions from a gene to create a specific protein. It's much easier to work with, reprogrammed, manufactured, and delivered. There're a number of approaches to use mRNA against cancer cells. One is using cancer related antigens, similar to the vaccine approach. mRNA is programmed to generate the antigen proteins in the body, which are attached to the cancer cells. The body's T-cells can then attack the tagged cancer cells.
The problem now is finding the correct antigens targeting the cancer cell type. Cancer cells are similar to health cells. You don't want to program a mRNA to generate antigen proteins that target health cells, which causes autoimmune problems.
Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
> and with few exceptions
Those few exceptions have been monumental in how they've changed cancer treatment. Skin cancer has been particularly well treated with immunotherapy, but other cancers have also benefited from the exact same research and drugs (as it turns out, the specific mutations the immunotherapies like Keytruda target express in other cancers). The reason skin cancer gets so much attention is because it's one of the most commonly diagnosed and treated cancers. (Colon is more common, I believe, but it often doesn't get detected. Get your colonoscopies folks).
It has moved fast enough that I've heard from multiple oncologists that the all 5 year survivability numbers are dated because the treatments are newer than the studies.
We've come a LONG way in a very short period in terms of cancer treatment. It still sucks, but not as much as it once did.
Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treatment has been revolutionized by the checkpoint inhibitors (as well as some other drugs targeting specific mutations).
I don't like words like "revolutionized" as they set wrong expectations.
For non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors (such as pembrolizumab, nivolumab, or atezolizumab), median overall survival typically ranges from about 10 to 20 months in advanced stages as opposed to 10-12 months for standard chemotherapy treatments.
That's great news especially as they would likely be better tolerated. Bt let's please not call living a handful of months longer as a 'revolution'.
> Individualized immune cancer therapy has been touted as the next big thing for half a century. It's nothing new, and with few exceptions, such as skin cancer, has failed to yield much. scientists, for decades, have tired to harness the immune system to attackcancer and it almost never works.
"Almost never" is doing a lot of work. You may be aware that most drugs fail over the course of development and human trials?
Anyway, checkpoint inhibitor therapy is a massive boon to oncology and was only brought into widespread use over the past 15 years.
Every cancer is different. Immunotherapy is highly effective, even curative, for some cancers. For my cancer, chemotherapy is curative, while other cancer's just shrug chemotherapy off like it's nothing.
Having a plethora of drugs and treatments is vital because cancer is not "one thing". Each type of cancer will respond better to some treatments than others.
Personalized mRNA vaccines are in fact, extremely new, and only made possible by recent advances across multiple fields. This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
I believe the comment was talking specifically about immunotherapy rather than personalized mRNA. But I'd agree it's still misinformed as immunotherapy has been a game changer across multiple cancers.
u/danjl was originally asking about "this class of drugs", which is more reasonably interpreted as referring to personalized mRNA vaccines rather than the much broader concept of (personalized or not) immunotherapy.
The comment is wrong because it's stupid. Just because we've known that personalized immunotherapy was a promising idea for a long time, and have been trying it with the limited tools we had (CAR T being the poster child, and while an incredible advancement for blood cancers and many other diseases, it is notoriously dangerous and expensive), does not mean we had the technology to accomplish it. Today's results are only possible because of recent advancements in multiple fields, and to respond with "they've tried immunotherapy for decades" is profoundly ignorant. You may as well say, "scientists have been trying to cure cancer for years."
> This comment reveals a total lack of basic understanding on this topic.
My thoughts as well, Keytruda alone has been a miracle to many many people at this point (quoting GP: "scientists, for decades, have tired [sic] to harness the immune system to attack cancer and it almost never works."), I frequently get ads for local CAR-T centers (unthinkable a little over a decade ago)
This appears to be a potentially huge win for health. The market has Moderna up 153% at time of writing, which is some sort of validation I suppose.
Related stories:
https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-per...
https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/merck-moderna-say-m...
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/moderna-merck-vaccine-succ...
For a while (like a year+ ago), the shares were trading around cash value. But they were burning through cash. Happy it’s worked out for them!
Many people, including myself, often take pot-shots at "big pharma." But, this just seems like a win-win, for the org and humanity. They believed in their tech, rode it out, and we all came out the better for it.
Often the case with big pharma. I for one will never join in on the populist backlash against those that make livesaving pharmaceuticals for us.
Yeah, this is a win. US pricing for insulin and asthma inhalers, not so much.
oh nice. If it goes up another 100% I may not lose money on this stock anymore.
And if it doubles after that, I may even beat a passive S&P 500 investment.
You know many stocks have done better than the SP500, right?
invest only in the ones that are going to go up - why didn't i think of that?!
I am in fact aware that some of my stock investments have beaten the market while others have underperformed the market.
MRNA, as it happens, is the latter.
That says more about you than Moderna:
https://totalrealreturns.com/n/MRNA,SPY
MRNA has vastly outperformed the market since IPO.
I mean, this appears to be validation of mRNA in general, right?
Saving a couple million people in the pandemic wasn’t validation enough?
100%. What I meant to say was that this proves that it wasn't somehow a one trick pony.
There is also a mRNU flu vaccine now: https://www.modernatx.com/ir-insights-mflusiva
I don't know if that counts as the same "trick" or not as it's another antiviral vaccine. Not that I disagree with you.
I read that this mRNA flu vaccine can be more effective then the regular annual flu shot, simply because the time to create it is shorter, therefor the guess at what strains will circulate that year is more accurate.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41701031/
But it is yet more validation. mRNA technology is here, get used to it.
I mean, the question is almost always about whether it's economical or not, right? Whether you can find diseases it's efficacious to treat with this mechanism, and prove it (trials are expensive).
I listened to a great podcast on this just a month ago - too bad that I thought all of this would obviously be priced in already… https://virological.podigee.io/51-21-cancer-vaccines-how-the...
I think the "expected value" was priced in, but regardless of the result, this trial would move the stock price towards that direction.
Biotech is one of the very very very few areas of the stockmarket where specialist knowledge generates alpha.
Trolling through random biotechs, learning about their tech, and investing in the most promising applications of that tech in the most impactful areas is something that happens somewhat on publicly traded markets. With tech, most of that happens pre-IPO.
Even if you were to optimally price in all available information you still have uncertainty of what will actually happen. i.e. A 1 dollar coin flip has an expected value of 50c before it’s thrown and it will collapse either to zero or to one after the uncertainty is resolved.
I don't believe the efficient market hypothesis. However even if you do, new information has arrived and that will affect the price.
Hard to price in the political factors now involved in Moderna's success or lack of success.
It was priced in, the share price prior to the news being released was taking into account a probability measurement of the trial succeeding or failing. You can’t price in both options of a binary outcome simultaneously, so part of the equity price was functionally equivalent to a call option on the outcome of the drug trial that only resolved after the trial results are announced.
It’s similar to the situation where a company puts out a public offer to buy another company at say, $50 a share on a day that the acquisition target is trading at $40/share.
If the stock of the target company is trading at $46/share, the market is pricing in the probability of the acquisition not happening. If the market knew the acquisition would happen with 100% certainty, the price of the target company shares would be equal to the buyout share price offer. You can assume the risk of the acquisition not happening by purchasing shares at $46, and if it does end up going through, you earn $4 a share from assuming that risk.
I wish people would find a decent source for these stories in order to post them on here instead of sending us to a tweet. I'm not on Twitterx and it's a mini nightmare on a mobile browser
Contrary to popular belief, twitter/x is completely fine.
Ever since I first heard of them a decade ago, it seemed that mRNA therapeutic vaccines were going to be the next wave of massive improvements in care. It's taken a bit longer than I had expected, and it's not that mRNA is the only way to make these sorts of vaccines, it's just so much better than the alternatives.
I'm very very excited to see what comes next.
My father has gastric melonama and pretty much last few days left — does someone with knowledge know if this vaccine can be of any help? Or any registry available?
Deepest sympathies, and I'm no oncologist - but I think that'd be like trying to patch the hull of the Titanic after her stern has lifted out of the water. So many cascading failures are in motion by then that saving him really isn't possible.
How are BioNtech's trials doing?
Are these two companies the ones to cure cancer (for the rich, being that these therapies require custom bio engineering).
A comment from Derek Lowe:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/merck-and-moderna-...
>Postscript: Our Secretary of Health and Human Services of course cancelled $500 million in mRNA vaccine R&D contracts (22 different programs) last year, and cited a pile of misinformation (and cluelessly misunderstood research citations) to justify it. Our Director of the National Institutes of Health was apparently just fine with this decision and cited mRNA vaccines’ alleged failure to “earn public trust” as one of his reasons, along with public statements that “the mRNA platform is no longer viable”. I have a number of suggestions for each of these individuals and their supporters about how they might spend the rest of their day, and will be glad to send details if they contact me.
Some say that mRNA therapies are getting better and better on a wider range of tumor types, anybody from the industry can confirm ?
According to Gemini, Moderna uses machine learning to speed up sequence selection and mRNA optimization. After all, this is not a mass-produced vaccine, but a personalized one.
I for one would like to see the data rather than a press release. Is this even serious? A press release with no link to outside twitter?
I feel like everything companies, and presidents, say now is directly geared to triggering AI trades.
The only thing they are looking at with this drug is people living one more month over existing drugs.
THIS IS NOTHING.
"The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab,"
https://www.merck.com/news/keytruda-pembrolizumab-mercks-ant...
The median PFS (progression-free survival) for KEYTRUDA was 5.5 months (2-week group) and 4.1 months (3-week group) compared to 2.8 months for ipilimumab (HR 0.58, P<0.00001 for the KEYTRUDA groups vs. ipilimumab, 95% CI, 0.46-0.72 for 2-week group and 0.47-0.72 for 3-week group, respectively). The estimated 6-month PFS rates for the KEYTRUDA and ipilimumab arms were 47.3 percent, 46.4 percent and 26.5 percent, respectively. One-year OS for KEYTRUDA was 74.1 percent (2-week group) and 68.4 percent (3-week group) compared to 58.2 percent for ipilimumab (HR 0.63 [95% CI, 0.47-0.83, P=0.00052] for the 2-week group and HR 0.69 [95% CI, 0.52-0.90, P=0.00358] for the 3-week group). At the time of analysis, median overall survival was not reached in any treatment group.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
3. This drug was approved for trial in 2014, so if it had something to do with deep learning, that would actually be a massive announcement.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
My interpretation of "triggering AI trades" is about tricking AI into buying stock, not tricking people into buying AI stocks.
Interjecting with a fact. Moderna described the neoantigen immunogenicity prediction algorithm they used to design the vaccines as “a deterministic machine learning (ML) algorithm,” so it may be a small neural network or more traditional algorithm, probably not deep learning.
Sorry--I was unclear. I was specifically responding to the OP's "CEOs these days want to join the AI hype wave" claim. My point was that the "hype wave" OP is referencing is really about deep learning, not what we think of as traditional statistical learning. Even the dedicated medical AI startups of that era, like BenevolentAI, were still doing traditional ML in 2014. So if Moderna really was trying to join the "AI hype train" and announce a deep learning result with this treatment, they'd be announcing that they successfully trained a deep neural network for drug discovery 12 years ago.
1. That's not what progression-free survival means.
I was not pointing to PFS as OS.
2. I don't think AI was mentioned once in this press release.
I did not say it was. I said it was written FOR AI trading algorithms to read and invest on.
4. The paragraph immediately following the one you clipped talks about Overall Response Rate (ORR) and throughout the release they discuss Overall Survival (OS).
Someone noted this was an earlier study. The newest study does not even have data out and yet here we are, investing on a press release.
5. This is not "NOTHING" in statistical terms, but even more so to people with melanoma.
You are talking to someone whose father died of pancreatic cancer. "Pancreatic cancer has a higher mortality rate compared to melanoma, with an estimated 52,740 deaths from pancreatic cancer in 2026, while melanoma has a significantly lower death rate. Additionally, the 5-year relative survival rate for pancreatic cancer is only 13.7%, compared to higher survival rates for melanoma."
What they did for my father was worse than nothing.
Yes every cancer is different, responds to different therapy, and with different survival rates. However, cancer treatment, as a whole, works. Oncologists do not prescribe incredibly intense treatments like chemotherapy out of nowhere. Chemotherapy is often not curative. Instead, it's used to both prolong life and improve quality of life.
Dying from late-stage cancer is often painful and miserable. It might be shocking, but getting just a few more months from chemo can provide a greater quality of life. Keyword can. Every oncologist is different with different recommendations, and they explain the risks very concretely. There is always an option to refuse treatment, but bear in mind it's not just about how quick you die. It's also about how much that dying sucks.
They told my father Chemo woudl add six months on his six month estimated lifespan. He died in two months cause the chemo blocked his liver. My sister in law was a chemo nurse and begged him not to get it. He died on loads of morphine. His last words were "It's all a scam!"
Sorry, you have no idea. Talk to a chemo nurse.
Talk to a chemo nurse? I've gotten two different chemo regimens. Yes, I know chemo has a risk because all medicine has a risk. I'm sorry for what happened to your father, but that doesn't fucking mean chemo is a scam. It saves lives, I should know.
Huh? How would chemo "block his liver"? Do you mean that he had a liver metastasis that the chemo didn't help with?
Chemotherapy can damage many organs including the liver. See "Organ Damage" on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemotherapy
A friend's sister beat colon cancer over ten years ago but now is having liver problems that took a while to pin down. They warned her she'd probably die in a couple years from the cancer without Chemo, but would have this risk long term and it recently showed up.
No it isn’t. They did a test with great specificity and got undeniable P values. Now they can refine the action and start saving people. This is a huge, huge win.
you're also looking at a different, older study. Keytruda is a little strange in that it has a very long tail in survivorship, works best in certain cases, and median PFS isn't a really great metric.
Yeah while a positive step, I do not understand a 90% stock increase.
So they added $30B market cap for a drug that would do by my napkin estimate about ~$7B average annual sales for 20 years as a front line treatment. Based on that alone, $30B in added market cap isn't enough. How much would you pay for $150B in high margin revenue?
But even more is the validation of this new custom MRNA novel cancer treating platform. If you take this data result to be a 'proof of concept', the expected value of the rest of their pipeline is suddenly worth a lot more.
Of course, this is all assuming the data is accurate and the drug gets approved, neither of which are 100% guaranteed.
See it as $60B value total among Moderna and Merck for the success of the trial, not 150% increase.
Oh yeah? Show me your discounted cash flow analysis.
/me shakes head in disbelief and closes the tab
There are a zillion news sources for this: OP what would possess you to pick the (largely dead) right wing Musk-owned Twitter ("X" )?
Has more posts than HN, yet would you describe this platform as 'dead'?
In other news, your barber thinks you need a haircut. Until there is a proven net overall health benefit to this therapy, I wouldn't waste much ink on it. Also, can someone please tell me how one controls the dose for an mRNA therapy ?
If you actually had melanoma (a very aggressive type of skin cancer) you would be glad for one more chance of maybe still being alive a few years from now.
not if you dropped dead from a heart attack after your therapy. Are you familiar with vioxx ? https://www.npr.org/2007/11/10/5470430/timeline-the-rise-and...
IF you dropped dead a decade later, it would be a fantastic trade-off.
Vioxx was a long-term problem. Having that problem instead would be a great trade-off relative to untreated melanoma.
Cancer treatment is different. We have a high tolerance for side effects because many cancers are aggressive and deadly. It's a risk-analysis. If your odds of dying from cancer in the next year are 50%, and the drugs have a 25% chance of killing you, then the drugs are worth it.
In actuality, even extremely aggressive therapies like high-dose chemotherapy with stem-cell transplant have shockingly low risk of death. Less than 5%. Bear in mind, that's for a therapy that literally wipes out all of your bone marrow. You know, the part of your body that produces your blood? Your body stops making blood and your immune system. And yet, we've gotten the death rate as low as it is.
See my comments below on Vioxx - even the manufacturers admitted covid shots caused myocarditis in young men - why are you so sure this new therapy won't cause the same issues, or worse ?
Covid itself has a higher risk of myocarditis than the covid vaccine.
And even if it did, it doesn't matter. You didn't read my comment at all. There are cancer treatments which can kill you outright, I know because I've received them. I think maybe you don't understand what cancer is. We can be very aggressive with the treatments. We have much, much bigger fish to fry than a small risk of myocarditis.
A successful phase 3 trial means that the drug is actually effective, not just safe. That's what they test in phase 3.
As there is no safety data available on this new drug, what makes you say it is safe ? Pre 2020 it took an average of 10 years to release a new vaccine - why do you think it took that long ?
How does one control the dose for anything? Why are you worried about mRNA vaccines in particular?
Radiation dose, for example, is precisely measured - we know exactly how much radiation the body is exposed to during therapy. mRNA products work by making our cells produce the desired protein/drug. There is no way of controlling how many cells are producing the drug and for how long they are producing it - ergo there is no way of controlling the dose. I hate to break it to you but they have found people producing spike protein over 3 years after getting the covid shot.
Spike proteints: new production or residual fragments?
Citation on the spike protein production?
Phone cancer is way worse and more prevalent than skin cancer. And it looks and acts the same. Let me know when they find a cure.