Squawk on the Street · Oct 24, 2026
With Rob Davis, Chairman and CEO, Merck
Moderna shares fell about 17% and Merck slipped about 2% after Phase 3 data from a melanoma vaccine trial the two companies ran together leaked days ahead of a planned presentation at the ESMO oncology conference.
Wall Street read the leaked number as underwhelming. Rob Davis, chairman and CEO of Merck, went on CNBC's Squawk on the Street to argue investors are reacting to the wrong figure entirely.
"We are very excited about what we see as landmark data."
Rob runs the company whose own blockbuster immunotherapy, Keytruda, sits inside the combination therapy under scrutiny, so any extension of Keytruda's franchise runs through data like this.
The full segment is covered here so you can skip it.
Here are the 4 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Merck's CEO says the market is reacting to the wrong number in the leaked melanoma trial data
The therapy is a personalized neoantigen vaccine paired with Keytruda, not a conventional drug
Combined with Keytruda, the therapy cuts relative recurrence/death risk by 42% on top of Keytruda's own ~40%
The six-month data shows a 58% reduction in recurrence or death, the number Rob says actually matters
1. Market has the wrong number
CNBC brought Rob on in a first-on-CNBC interview right after the leak, and he opened by defending the data itself before addressing the stock reaction.
Rob predicts the market comes around
"I'm quite confident that as the medical community, as the investor community really comes to fully appreciate and understand what we are showing, they will come to appreciate that as well." — Rob Davis
Rob argued the initial sell-off reflects an incomplete read of the trial, not a verdict on the science. He said both doctors and investors need time to work through the full dataset before the market's view catches up. That framing set up the specific numbers he spent the rest of the interview defending.
