AI helps create Moderna cancer vaccine

US biotech companies Moderna and Merck have made a breakthrough in personalised cancer vaccines with AI, which can change the way cancer is treated. Tech trillionaire Elon Musk says that such developments show that curing diseases is now just a software problem.Moderna has made a big cancer vaccine breakthrough with AI.For years, experts have said that AI will cure cancer one day. Now, AI has helped US biotech companies Moderna and Merck create a breakthrough cancer vaccine that can change the way the disease is treated. The companies said that their personalised cancer vaccine succeeded in a large-scale trial. Tech trillionaire Elon Musk has now claimed that curing diseases was just a software problem now.The companies announced positive results from the Phase 3 trial of intismeran autogene, a personalised mRNA-based cancer vaccine, in patients with late-stage melanoma, a serious form of skin cancer.Moderna and Merck said the treatment helped prevent melanoma from returning or spreading in patients whose tumours had been removed through surgery. The treatment was tested alongside Merck's immunotherapy drug Keytruda in a trial involving more than 1,000 melanoma patients at high risk of recurrence.US President Donald Trump reacted to this development. “It’s going to create tremendous innovation medically. They came out with something today that I looked at I won’t go into the details, but having to do with a pretty unstoppable disease,” he said during a press conference. “And all of a sudden they are coming up with answers that they never thought were possible, and things that they never even would have thought about.” Elon Musk reckoned that this breakthrough showed that curing diseases had become a software problem today. "Despite its obvious misuse during Covid, mRNA has tremendous promise for curing diseases. Artificial RNA essentially makes curing diseases a software problem,” he wrote on X. Elon Musk believes curing diseases is now a software problem. How did AI help create the cancer vaccine?Personalised mRNA vaccines are different from chemotherapy, which can also damage healthy cells. Personalised cancer vaccines are aimed at firing up the immune system towards mutations found in a patient's tumour. There is no “fit-for-all” method in this case. Rather, each vaccine is designed specifically for each patient based on the unique set of mutations within their tumour.In the treatment, scientists removed the tumour of patients and sent a sample for genetic sequencing. A tumour has hundreds of mutations, most of which are part of cancer cells, but not in a patient’s healthy cells. The AI then went through these mutations within the tumour and ranked them on the basis of how likely they were to fire up the patient’s immune system.After identifying up to 34 such mutations, automated software writes instructions to make those exact mutated proteins into an mRNA vaccine. The vaccine is then manufactured and injected into the patient. The patient’s body reads the mRNA from the vaccine and makes the proteins. This allows the immune system to recognise and attack any cancer cells carrying them.That is, the AI and automated systems help find the right mutations and create the vaccine that helps a patient’s immune system to fire up and attack cancer cells.Big breakthrough for cancer treatmentsModerna says that thousands of melanoma patients could benefit in the first few years after approval. The companies plan to present the data at an international medical meeting and engage with regulators on filing submissions for intismeran autogene in combination with Keytruda.This breakthrough can change the way we treat cancer today. “By intervening earlier in the course of disease, when many cancers are considered most treatable, the goal of adjuvant therapy given after surgery is to increase the possibility of cure for more patients,” said Dr Dean Y Li, president, Merck Research Laboratories. Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel said the findings brought closer a long-held goal of creating an mRNA treatment designed for an individual patient’s cancer.Professor Georgina Long, the study’s principal investigator, said the results showed that the vaccine, designed from the mutational “fingerprint” of a patient’s own tumour could reduce the risk of recurrence or death compared with Keytruda alone.The results of this trial come at a time when there is growing debate about the impact of AI in curing diseases. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently said on X that AI may help cure most human diseases in the next 5-10 years. Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis believes “one day maybe we can cure all disease with the help of AI.”- EndsPublished By: Armaan AgarwalPublished On: Aug 20, 2026 11:24 IST