MRK
MRNA
The Street just turned up the volume
Moderna got a fresh bull case from William Blair, which moved the stock from Market Perform to Outperform after the company’s individualized cancer therapy, intismeran, posted encouraging interim data in advanced skin cancer.
The core takeaway: the combo with Merck’s Keytruda showed statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvements in recurrence-free survival and distant metastasis-free survival versus Keytruda alone. In plain English, that’s the kind of data that can make an analyst stop squinting and start adding zeros to a model.
Why investors are suddenly doing oncology math
The analyst didn’t just like the headline — they also reworked the long-term spreadsheet:
- Higher probability of approval for adjuvant melanoma, boosted from 65% to 90%
- Extended sales modeling out to 2040
- Estimated more than $5.4 billion in Moderna sales from melanoma alone, assuming a 50/50 profit split with Merck
And that’s before you get to the other cancer types. William Blair also layered in potential revenue from NSCLC and renal cell carcinoma, which is basically the market’s favorite game: “what if this thing is bigger than we thought?”
The catch? Expectations are now towering
MRNA was already on a sugar rush after the data readout, reportedly ripping about 170% on Wednesday before giving back some of that heat on Thursday. So yes, the science looks better — but the stock now has a much higher bar to clear if the next rounds of data or approvals stumble.
Big picture: Moderna is trying to prove it’s not just a vaccine company with a side hustle in biotech hope. If intismeran keeps landing, this could become a legit oncology franchise — the kind Wall Street loves to pretend it saw coming all along.