The a16z Show · Wednesday, September 2, 2026
Stéphane Bancel explained that the personalized cancer vaccine works by sequencing a patient's tumor and comparing it to healthy cells to identify unique mutations. This information is then used to create a personalized mRNA treatment that instructs the immune system to attack the cancer.
“We're going to basically take a biopsy of your tumor. We're going to read all the letters of its DNA and then we're going to do the same thing with a healthy cell of your body and we're going to literally compare letter by letter nucleotide by nucleotide and then we're going to use an algorithm to identify which one of those mutations are the most relevant.”
“And so when this is injected in your body, it teaches the immune system the signature of your cancer cell that it missed.”
“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.”