Exciting news from the world of medicine. Merck and Moderna announced positive topline Phase 3 results for their cancer treatment of melanoma, which utilizes AI in the process.
The treatment involves INTerpath-001 Trial of Intismeran Autogene Plus KEYTRUD. The basic concept is developing an individualized or personalized cancer treatment for each patient based on the person’s DNA and identifying neoantigens (mutated proteins from cancer cells) to target.
A highly simplified summary of the process:
- Researchers take a person’s cancer cells and sequence the person’s DNA, and compare them with the persona’s normal cells
- Use AI algorithms in the lab to identify up to 34 neoantigens (mutated proteins from cancer cells) to target for treatment
- Use mRNA (similar to what Moderna used in COVID vaccines) to develop a mRNA vaccine encoded with the identified neoantigens to elicit the body’s anticancer responses to build immunity.
In 2023, Moderna described AI’s key role:
“AI plays an important role in simplifying these processes and helping us move with speed and precision, especially when confronted with thousands of patient batches. On the design end, a series of fully integrated AI algorithms takes next-generation sequencing data from tumor and blood samples, reviews their genetic mutations, and predicts up to 34 of those neoantigens that are most likely to elicit an immune response. This algorithm has the potential to learn over time, through pairing clinical and immunogenicity data, and will hopefully become better at selecting the most clinically active neoantigens.
“On the manufacturing end, we created Maestro, an end-to-end digital solution that offers cross functional views of all manufacturing activities for every patient in the INT clinical trial program. This holistic view allows Moderna to tightly coordinate tasks across clinical operations, manufacturing, quality assurance, shipment logistics and more, and automatically adjust downstream planning in light of any changes to ensure INT is delivered in time for every patient’s target dose date.
“Our AI scheduling algorithm helps automatically place a patient’s batch schedule onto a timeline, taking into account a real-time snapshot of our manufacturing capability in all constraints. As the volume of patient batches we execute on in parallel increases, this solution is critical to ensuring supply chain planners have a comprehensive view of each patient batch and is in sync with any clinical site scheduling updates to ensure we deliver every INT dose on time.”
is this personalized method to treating cancer a path forward?
It’s too early to tell whether the Moderna-Merck method of using personalized treatment of cancers based on analysis of the person’s DNA and mutations will turn out to be a key that unlocks the development of cures for cancer that have escaped human research for generations.
These Phase 3 results were just announced and there’s still a long way to go for Moderna-Merck’s own treatment. But the results are quite impressive:
That we are even having this conversation is promising in itself — and hopefully the start of an acceleration to finding cures for cancers in the near future.
what patents have moderna and merck filed for?
I’ve tracked down one of the patent applications that Moderna filed related to its cancer treatment. Here’s the diagram of the computational analysis of which neoantingens to target. (There are multiple patent applications related to the cancer vaccine but I’ll highlight here this one, US 2021/0268086.) I believe this patent application is still pending and has not been granted.
This application was filed in 2021 and used the world “algorithms” to describe the mechanism for their analysis. In the 2023 online webpage, Moderna described it as AI algorithms.
