The Cancer Vaccine That Worked and the Wearables That Don't?

A personalised mRNA cancer vaccine has succeeded in a late-stage trial for the first time, and Moderna's shares ripped as much as 177% in a single day on the news. Cancer vaccines have been a graveyard for decades. Something changed.

In the third What the Health Wrap, host Emily Casey is joined by two of her Tenmile colleagues — Dr Joey Man and Dr Michael Lamprecht, investors and scientists with roughly 30 years between them across molecular biology, therapeutics and biotech in the US, Singapore and Australia — for the lunchroom conversation, not the press release.

They start with Moderna and Merck's Phase 3 result. Intismeran autogene, given alongside Keytruda after melanoma surgery, met its primary endpoint of recurrence-free survival and a key secondary endpoint in a trial of more than 1,100 patients. Michael explains what an individualised neoantigen therapy actually is: take a piece of the patient's tumour, work out which signals mark it out from healthy tissue, and turn those into a bespoke vaccine that teaches the immune system what to attack. Joey walks through the part she finds most elegant — an algorithm that reads the patient's normal tissue against their tumour, predicts the mutations a future metastasis would express, picks the top 36, and produces a single-patient batch on a six-to-eight-week timeline deliberately synchronised with the surgery and the standard Keytruda schedule.

The more interesting question is why this one worked when so many didn't. Michael's answer has three parts: it is given in combination with a drug that releases the brake on the immune system, it uses antigens specific to that patient rather than the off-the-shelf antigens that failed before, and — critically — the sponsors got regulators to assess the process rather than each individual antigen. The COVID years, for all the reputational damage they did to mRNA, built the manufacturing infrastructure that makes a one-patient batch possible at all. Joey's read on the share price: a fair reward for patience and a pivot, and a sign that the market has not written off mRNA the way the politics suggested.

From there the conversation turns to the thing Joey is genuinely worried about. From 1 February 2027, Australian reforms will let health technology providers — wearables and monitoring platforms included — collect, use and disclose individual healthcare identifiers with patient consent for permitted purposes. It is close to a world first, and it lands just as a roughly U