The a16z Show · Wednesday, September 2, 2026
The discussion highlighted the potential of mRNA technology for personalized cancer vaccines, with Stéphane Bancel explaining that the field has seen over 1000 failed trials in cancer vaccines prior to this advancement. The approach involves teaching the immune system to recognize cancer signals that it previously missed.
“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.”
“Because what we know today in the field is that we all have cancer cells all the time in our body, for whatever reason or mutations or just as you have replication and you have mistakes that happen that create mutation of DNA that are cancer cells.”
“And so our immune system is very well trained to notice those cancer cells very early and get rid of them.”