Moderna shares surged about 14% on Friday, October 9, closing near $225 and hitting a four-year high. Two catalysts fired at once: the company's return to the Nasdaq-100 index and a New York Times report that the National Institutes of Health is pushing a national cancer-vaccine effort.
Moderna closed Thursday at $197, then gapped higher on Friday, setting a fresh 52-week high and finishing near $225, up about 14%. The whole vaccine complex rallied: Novavax rose about 16% to near $13, Vaxcyte gained about 10%, BioNTech added about 5%, Merck rose about 2%, and Pfizer climbed more than 2%.
Nasdaq announced on October 1 that Moderna would rejoin the Nasdaq-100 before the open on October 9, replacing Warner Bros. Discovery. The index tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies listed on Nasdaq and is followed by more than 200 products with over $800 billion in assets; reconstitutions force index-tracking funds to buy. Moderna had fallen out of the index in December 2024 after its post-pandemic COVID vaccine slide pushed its market value below the cutoff.
The New York Times reported Friday that Dr. Anthony Letai, director of the National Cancer Institute, wants a national effort to speed development of personalized cancer vaccines. The vision is a public-private partnership among the NIH, the nonprofit Foundation for the NIH, researchers, drug and biotech companies, advocacy groups, philanthropies, and patients. Stacey Adam, a senior clinical officer at the foundation, told the Times she hopes it will resemble the collaboration that produced the COVID shots.
The program is expected to begin in December, starting with pancreatic, liver, and colorectal cancers, plus a subset of pediatric tumors. Adam's goal: within seven to ten years, a patient could receive a vaccine in a doctor's office — far faster than the eight to 15 years she said approval can take when the work is fragmented. Unlike most vaccines, cancer vaccines are treatments rather than preventives: each is built for one patient, training T cells to attack abnormal proteins found on that person's tumor and nowhere else, mostly using mRNA technology.
Moderna and Merck had already announced that their personalized cancer vaccine intismeran autogene plus Keytruda met its main melanoma goal in a Phase 3 trial. The market is repricing Moderna from a "COVID vaccine company" into an oncology mRNA platform. Simply Wall St notes the stock now trades near a four-year high while the average analyst target sits far lower, so valuation debates are heating up.
Bank of America lifted its Moderna price target to $200 from $170 on Friday, keeping a Neutral rating. Near term, details of the December program launch and follow-up data from Moderna and Merck in lung, bladder, kidney, and other cancers will decide whether this policy-driven rally can hold.