Moderna and Merck said their experimental personalised cancer vaccine met its primary and secondary goals in a melanoma trial, sending Moderna shares nearly three times higher and adding about $44 billion to the company’s market value. The vaccine met its main goal of preventing melanoma from returning and a secondary goal of stopping the cancer from spreading elsewhere in the body. The companies plan to present detailed results at a medical conference later this year and are targeting potential U.S. approval next year, although they have not disclosed the treatment’s effectiveness, the proportion of patients who benefited, how durable its effects may be or its production cost. The treatment uses genetic sequencing to identify mutations unique to each patient’s tumour, then algorithms select as many as 34 targets for encoding into an mRNA strand (messenger RNA used to instruct cells), administered alongside Merck’s Keytruda immunotherapy. The programme is central to Moderna’s effort to build a business beyond Covid-19 vaccines after sales fell by nearly two-thirds in 2023, prompting job cuts and research cancellations. Earlier results showed the combination reduced the risk of melanoma recurrence or death by 44% versus Keytruda alone. Moderna and Merck are also testing the platform in lung, kidney and pancreatic cancers.