Will Kenilworth's $300+ Million Bet -- On Moderna's Still-In-Vitro mRNA Approach -- Pay Off?

This morning, Bloomberg has a nicely-boosterish longer story out on Moderna Therapeutics -- the privately held Cambridge company, in which Merck has made substantial early investments. Here by way of reminders, are our January 2015, and June 2016 -- backgrounders on this relationship.

Indeed, assuming the "render time" may be reliably-reduced to three or four weeks, it is hard not to be excited about designing personal cancer vaccines. But, as ever, price -- and thus access -- will be significant hurdles. Here's a bit -- from the Bloomberg "first dosing" story; do go read it all:

. . . .Six weeks ago, a 1-millimeter cube of cancer tissue collected by doctors from the right lung of 67-year-old retiree Glenda Cleaver was packed in a box at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee. It was the beginning of a journey Moderna hopes will lead to a long-sought goal: a vaccine that trains the body to attack tumors. . . .

Swathed in cooling gel packs to keep it at 5 degrees Celsius, Cleaver’s tissue was sent with a second box containing a four-inch vial of Cleaver’s frozen blood to Kentucky, where it was entered into a tracking system. From there, the samples were shipped to a facility on the West Coast where machines scanned the tumor’s genetic code and compared it to the blood, hunting for the malevolent changes that spawned Cleaver’s cancer.

On Monday, Cleaver, the first person to be enrolled in Moderna’s study of its personalized cancer vaccine, returned to Sarah Cannon, where another FedEx box waited. It contained a vial no larger than Cleaver’s palm. It took about 100 people to make and will work for only one person -- her. . . .

Traditional protein-based biotechnology medicines are grown in vats and harvested from living organisms, a tedious and expensive process. The company wants to make it possible for a patient’s body to make its own medicine using strands of genetic instructions called messenger RNA, or mRNA. . . .

So it goes. Personally, I expect that this investment will prove to be one of Merck's most prescient.

Below, an anonymous commenter offered this fine life-affirming Macy Gray track, as a pick me up (in reply to my masthead revisions, overnight). In call and response fashion, and echoing that, I'll offer this one. Truly, there is so, so much joy in my world. . . full of. . . new life. But also in truth, this other Macy Gray still follows me, even all these years on, on a rainy cool Tuesday here (yes -- now you know):



Yes, now you know -- I try to play it off. . . .

नमस्ते