Moderna ($MRNA) podcast mentions
Well, I am very excited as I see what's happening with AI as it pertains to healthcare, to put a little bit of a more positive follow-up to our earlier discussion. You know, This is a space where you're not maybe seeing as much of the flashy use cases of AI that we do in other industries. What AI is doing in healthcare is it is really helping to refine and optimize the long health processes of drug development, discovery, optimizing clinical trials. You know, it's not replacing doctors and scientists. It's helping companies develop, you know, commercialize, manufacture, and optimize really the entire timeline from drug discovery to approval, to getting it into the hands of patients at a much more favorable rate. I mean, you have to think about how the average drug, it can take over a decade, a couple billion dollars on average to bring a drug to market. 90% fail in later stage trials anyway. And so AI is really being used as an automation and data engine to attack a lot of the bottlenecks that have historically made drug development so slow. And you can see that everywhere from, you know, the big pharmaceutical companies that are leveraging AI models behind the scenes to biotech companies that are that are much more kind of upfront about the use cases for which they're finding, you know, value in AI. I mean, you know, Moderna is a great example, right? Obviously they're working on their cancer vaccine with Merck. This has been something that's gotten a lot of attention from investors recently. Well, they have their own, you know, system called Maestro that helps orchestrate these personalized vaccines. It reads a patient's tumor sequence, it predicts the best immune response. Crystal Biotech is another really interesting company. They make redosable gene therapies for a rare skin disease, and they are using AI and machine learning to run real-time quality control in their production lines. So seeing the way this technology shows up in really practical use cases, as someone who is following AI broadly but is also a healthcare investor, that's really exciting. And I think it creates a lot of opportunity for investors.
Rachel Warren · Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing · AI Leaders Want to Slow Down Development For… · 2026-09-14Anthropic has also reportedly tapped Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to help lead the offering, which could see it raise as much as $100 billion. And in the Wall Street research corner, the Goldman Sachs equity team has rebalanced its long-duration basket amid rising interest rates. Equities usually struggle to digest sharp increases in interest rates, with long-duration growth stocks disproportionately hurt by rising discount rates. Among the names are Coca-Cola, DraftKings, EchoStar, Moderna, and Snowflake. See the full basket in our story on Seeking Alpha. That link will be in show notes. That's all for today's Wall Street Lunch. Look for links for stories in the show notes section. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at seekingalpha.com/wsp. And make sure you're getting the most out of your portfolio with quant news and analysis by heading to seekingalpha.com/subscriptions.
Kim Kahn · Wall Street Breakfast · Tesla Roadster could finally take flight · 2026-09-14Yeah, you're right. Moderna just did. I mean, the fact that Dario can write a blog post and say, what happens when we cure every disease? And then we debate it as a serious topic. Like, what world are we living in here? You know? Um, I also think that we're collectively worried always, like, you know, the kind of these abstractions, the world, the average worker, the middle manager, the person who lives in the vicinity of a data center. These are abstractions, but our actual lives seem like they're getting more fulfilled. We're more capable, we're more empowered. So I think that's also something that the revealed preferences tend to show. How people are experiencing it individually, and the stated preferences tend to show how people are sort of observing it or believe it's playing out societally. You know, if you ask people if they want a data center in their neighborhood, most will say no. But if you ask them if they use ChatGPT today, most people will say yes. So that's kind of the dissonance.
Anish Acharya · The a16z Show · Why Companies Are Becoming a Series of Loops | Anish Acharya on Lenny’s Podcast · 2026-09-12But defense in fantasy is a bit different because you can also get upside from sacks, turnovers, and especially defense and special teams touchdowns. So for our stock market equivalent, I think that Merck's a good fit as a drug company. Merck's inherently defensive in nature. It does fine even in a bad economy. Good if the Fed chooses to jack up rates. Right. At the same time, it can also give you real upside, as we saw when Merck's partner Moderna put up some promising melanoma vaccine results. There's a reason Merck's now up 41% year to date. In terms of the NFL, that reminds me of the L.A. Rams defense. The only concern is age. The Rams have to do well this year because They're up. It's a ticking clock for them given that the team has so many older players. Merck, too, is racing against the clock to build a pipeline of new drugs that could offset some big upcoming patent expirations from their fantastic Keytruda oncology platform. Finally, we have to round out what our fantasy roster with a kicker. In fantasy football, you can get negative points if they miss extra points or field goals. So you really got to have someone with accuracy, but you can also get a nice bundle of points for a long field goal. So a kicker with range is a nice bonus. As I see it, a kicker is kind of like— it's like a good energy stock. It's like Chevron. It usually doesn't trade with the rest of the market because higher oil is bad for everybody else's business. Plus, it's got an excellent 3.4% yield. That's like a steady flow of extra point kicks. But as we've seen, there are times like this year where oil prices are rising and Chevron can give you great returns. So far this year, the stock is up nearly 40%. That's like a season when your kicker hits a couple of 60 plus-yard field goals and earns you a surprise win or two. A couple years ago, Chevron officially moved its corporate headquarters from California to Houston, Texas. So we think a good NFL analog is Houston Texans kicker, Kimi Fairbairn. He's the second best— Kimi Fairbairn, it's the hardest name to spell in the whole thing— he's second best kicker in fantasy football this year.
Jim Cramer · Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer · 'Mad Money w/ Jim Cramer 9/8/26 · 2026-09-08Look, I would say two areas of interest outside of AI, and any PM we talk to is telling us, give us your even third best idea that's not AI related. And I think the two that have really caught a lot of interest are banks and healthcare, especially banks. You know, just the regulatory environment's helpful, the capital, capital situation is very positive. And then on the healthcare side, after that Moderna announcement, I think people got really excited about pharma and biotech. So if you look at, you know, the consensus portfolio right now, I think a lot of capital goods, which is kind of AI buildout, pharma and biotech banks, and then semis and hardware after that. So again, I would say outside of AI, healthcare and banks would be the two areas where there's a lot of focus.
Stuart Kaiser · Bloomberg Surveillance · Geopolitical Risks and Market Uncertainty · 2026-09-08Stig Brodersen I don't want to go on a tangent here, and perhaps the Zipline co-founder has a different definition of what teleportation means, but I think generally we just had Moderna coming out with, I think, the news that they now have the first vaccine against cancer, at least a form of it. So whenever we have these stories and I just feel about what will the world look like in 10 years' time, you just have to be excited, right? I mean, you might order food and there's a drone coming, and I think it's even happening in some countries. I mean, we covered Coupang a while ago and they already use drones to deliver packages. But all of that, you know, just gets me excited thinking about where the world could be in 10, 15 years' time. And I think that's also a great part of why we like to look at these companies. And especially Uber is one of those where you just see so many things that could just make your life better. But anyway, just to add to that, and I'm, I think for a couple of years, Uber's US rides business was noticeably slowing while Europe and Latin America still grew quite fast. I think it was about 30%. And it turns out that some of this was self-inflicted in a sense, since US insurance costs were inflating at, I said it before, double-digit rates and Uber passed those costs onto US pricing. And there's no evidence and I guess it shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone that higher pricing slowed down demand, and management actually described it as an accidental A/B test on price elasticity with America as the test group. I don't really know what I think about that. I think this is perhaps a bit too important to turn into an A/B test. But anyway, now that insurance has normalized, they are passing those savings back into lower prices, and the US business is very much reaccelerating, which is great because it's obviously one of the most important parts of the Uber business. But also, it's kind of funny to say that the US is not necessarily Uber's most profitable market in terms of per capita economics because in some countries, and I think it's namely developing markets, Uber isn't even required to provide insurance at all.
Stig Brodersen · The Investor's Podcast (We Study Billionaires) - The Investor’s Podcast Network · TIP844: Uber (UBER): The Autonomy Referendum — Is Mr. Market Completely Wrong? w/ Daniel Mahncke & Shawn O’Malley · 2026-09-06Well, you're talking here about that so-called vaccine for melanoma, at least a trial that showed real progress. And obviously Moderna was a key part of that as well.
David Faber · Squawk on the Street · 9AM HOUR: Oil and Yields Watch, Dell Surges, Chevron CEO "First on CNBC" in Venezuela 9/2/26 · 2026-09-02Before Moderna's mRNA platform helped produce a COVID vaccine, the company was already working toward another goal: using mRNA to fight cancer. A decade later, that bet has reached a major milestone. A16Z general partner Jorge Khande sits down with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel following positive Phase 3 results from Moderna and Merck's individualized mRNA treatment for melanoma. It's the culmination of a project Moderna has been working on for roughly a decade. Stefan explains how Moderna takes a patient's tumor, sequences it against their healthy cells, identifies the mutations unique to that cancer, and uses that information to manufacture a personalized mRNA designed to teach the immune system what to attack. And because roughly 90% of the selected antigens differ from one patient to another, personalization isn't an edge case. It's fundamental to how the treatment works. They also get into the extraordinary operational challenge behind this. How do you manufacture thousands of different medicines, one patient at a time, quickly and reliably enough to make personalized medicine work at scale? And finally, they look at where the platform could go next, from other cancers to rare genetic and autoimmune diseases.
Speaker C · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02Hi, welcome to the A16Z Podcast. I'm Jorge Conde, a general partner on the A16Z Bio and Health team. I am thrilled today to welcome back Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel. For folks that have been longtime listeners may recall, Stéphane joined us on the A6Z podcast back in December of 2020 when we were talking about all of the work Moderna did to bring us the mRNA COVID vaccine. And at the time, if you can go back and listen to that episode, you'll hear how quickly Moderna was able to react to the existence of the virus, to analyze it, to essentially print a vaccine that would protect people against the COVID-19 vaccine, and hence put us in a much better position with respect to the COVID pandemic. We titled that, that episode, The Machine That Made the Vaccine. And the reason why we're talking again today in August 2026 is because Moderna has put out news on a really big advancement on what they can do with mRNA technology when it comes to cancer. And so I want to hand it over to you, Stéphane. Again, a very big welcome. Thank you for coming back. But maybe the place to start is let's lead with the news. Moderna and Merck announced earlier this month in August that you had conducted a Phase 3 clinical trial in melanoma and have gotten very encouraging results. So why don't I hand it over to you and tell us what have you announced, what have you seen in this Phase 3 trial? And then I do want to dig in into what Moderna is doing in cancer.
Jorge Conde · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02So you see people, if you look at the label of the clinical studies, people that get checkpoints, whether it's Keytruda or any other type of checkpoints from other companies, They end up having type 1 diabetes, lupus, Crohn's disease, these type of things. Of course, it's better to have those disease than of course being dead from your cancer, which is why those have become standard of care. But think about those 40% of people who don't respond to checkpoint. They get an autoimmune disease most of the time, and they don't get the benefit of a medicine. And so what we try to do with Merck, and it's really a technology that emerged from Moderna Labs back in 2015. 2016 when we did a partnership with Merck as we were looking for one of the best companies in immunotherapy to partner and to have a complement approach. The idea that we have at the time using our infectious disease learning from our infectious disease vaccine, we learned a lot about the immune system and how mRNA interact with the immune system. We thought we could develop a mechanism of action that was totally orthogonal, so very different. From immunotherapy because you will be able to start from a sequence of your tumor. Mm-hmm. So that we could design a product to basically teach, if I go back to the dog analogy, to teach those dogs what to look for very specifically. And that's really the, the beauty of, about our technology is if you think about Keytruda, it basically unleashes the dogs, but they go a bit randomly sometimes. It's your immune system. Whereas Monat product is able, able at the molecular level inside your immune system to very specifically teach your T-cell, this is what you need to look for, and that thing is actually on your cancer cell so that those T-cells go and basically attack your cancer cells.
Stéphane Bancel · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02Okay. And so as you point out, the field has tried this many times before. A thousand, on the order of a thousand clinical trials, um, have, have tested this theory. They've all failed. You and Moderna and Merck have succeeded here. What was different this time? What is it about mRNA technology that enables the immune system to learn in a way that other approaches were unable to be successful?
Jorge Conde · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02You know, assuming that, that carries over. Um, and so in that regard, uh, you know, if you're doing, let's say, this normal-to-tumor comparison of the genome, you find the differences. I'm curious how you arrive at 34 as— up to 34 as the right number. I'm sure there's a very good reason for that. But what is the algorithm that enables you to do that? Is this something that's proprietary to Moderna? Is this something that is known within the field? Help us understand, like, help us look into that black box.
Jorge Conde · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02Well, it's exactly the same for Intezumab, which is the current version of Intezumab that Moderna is the worst version of Intezumab you're gonna see for the rest of medical history. And so that gave me a lot of hope, not only in melanoma for those 20% of patients that don't respond, but also for potentially other tumors. That have been really hard in the field, like, you know, uh, pancreas cancer and others where immunotherapy doesn't work. We want to be able to learn a lot about the technology using also what the field has learned in the last 10 years, cuz the field has learned a lot, as you know. This is even not in Intispyron 1.0, so that's why I'm so excited about what's coming next.
Stéphane Bancel · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02So I've had the benefit of, of, of seeing Moderna from the earliest days.
Jorge Conde · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02So maybe one place to focus is on this concept of personalization. I'm sure you've seen the story of the GitLab founder who went founder mode on his own osteosarcoma. Number one, do the future Sids of the world come to Moderna, or is this N-of-1 phenomenon something that you think will just happen and exist in parallel?
Jorge Conde · The a16z Show · Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine · 2026-09-02