How Did One Merck Drug Outearn Every Major Lab?

Nworah Ayogu said Keytruda, one Merck drug, had 2025 revenue larger than the revenue of all the major labs combined. Biotech is already big business. Companies keep finding new uses for medications like Keytruda. Keytruda is a checkpoint inhibitor, an immune booster that can boost the immune system.

Nworah Ayogu said he thinks Merck and Moderna's new cancer vaccine is an example of amazing frontier science. Moderna are the COVID goats of mRNA. For melanoma, a specific type of skin cancer, surgery takes the tumor out. Each tumor is unique because tumors mutate and change in different ways. Nworah Ayogu said a mother's cancer is likely different in a lot of ways from the cancer of someone else. The tumor is sequenced to find the parts of the tumor's expression and the tumor's own genome that make it unique, and an mRNA vaccine is created to target that exact cancer.

The vaccine is then injected, and Keytruda is given at the same time for an immune boost, so the immune system can recognize the cancer more easily. Any microscopic pieces of the cancer still floating around in the body are wiped out by the boosted immune system.