Americans continue to drink less alcohol than ever before, according to a new Gallup poll.

Only 54% of U.S. adults surveyed by the analytics firm in July said they ever drink alcohol—the same share as last year and the lowest recorded since Gallup began surveying Americans on this topic in 1939, says Lydia Saad, Gallup’s director of U.S. social research.

“We saw a significant decline in people’s use of alcohol last year, but whether that was a one-time reaction or a trend, we had to wait and see,” Saad says. “This year’s result tells us that whatever is happening out there is a sustained change. Drinking has gone down across all age groups.”

More public awareness of alcohol’s health risks could be prompting Americans to drink less, the poll results suggest. A little more than half of Americans surveyed this year said that alcohol is “bad for health,” compared to the less than 30% of people who said that a decade ago; and 86% of people polled said they had heard of recent studies about the long-term health effects of alcohol—a 7% increase from 2024. Drinking alcohol has been linked to several forms of cancer, as well as higher risks of liver and heart disease, among other health effects.

“The decline in alcohol use coincides with a sharp increase in concern about the health risks of drinking,” Saad says. 

https://x.com/Gallup/status/2090452609316335964?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw

But researchers who study alcohol say the poll results don’t provide a complete picture of alcohol use in America. While drinking might be declining overall, alcohol remains the country’s second-deadliest drug, behind tobacco. Alcohol kills about 178,000 people yearly, and harmful drinking remains a challenge for many people. 

“Many people are changing their attitudes towards drinking and intoxication for health reasons, which means that the number of people who say they drink may be declining because lighter drinkers who are more health conscious and more capable of changing their drinking are maybe choosing to cut back or not drink at all,” says Thomas Babor, a professor emeritus at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine who studies alcohol and alcohol addiction.

“But the rates of drinking and drinking problems remain unacceptably high” among some groups, including college students and older people, Babor says. “The big picture is: alcohol consumption is one of the biggest risk factors for chronic diseases and many other health conditions.”

According to the 2025 National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), 44% of U.S. teenagers and adults who drank alcohol said they had engaged in binge drinking in the past month, and about 10%—about 14.5 million people—said they engaged in heavy drinking, defined as binge drinking on 5 or more days in the past 30 days. 

NSDUH results show that the numbers of binge and heavy drinkers declined overall since 2021. But percentages for binge and heavy alcohol use among underage drinkers didn’t change from 2021 to 2025. Among people aged 65 and older, about 10% in 2025 said they engaged in binge drinking, compared to about 12% in 2021.

In the new Gallup poll, people were asked if they “sometimes drink more alcoholic beverages than you think you should.” Some 13% of respondents said yes to that question, another record low, according to Gallup. 

More research is needed to better understand why people are drinking less, says Traci Toomey, a public health policy expert at the University of Minnesota who studies alcohol and cannabis. Health concerns are likely a factor, but there may be other reasons too, she says.

It isn’t clear if an increase in cannabis use, for example, is driving some of the decline. “We don’t know if it’s a substitution, but that’s a question we need to answer,” Toomey says.

Use of GLP-1 drugs, which studies suggest may help reduce alcohol consumption and craving in people with alcohol abuse disorder, along with higher alcohol prices and policies to curb harmful and underage drinking, may also be playing a role, she says.

Saad, of Gallup, says there could be political factors at play too. According to the new Gallup poll, alcohol use has declined significantly among Republicans and Independents, while Democrats’ alcohol consumption has remained virtually unchanged since 2023. 

“It could be worth looking into what kind of political messaging is going on, and if it’s more effective among Republicans and Independents than Democrats,” Saad says. 

She notes, however, that “we haven’t seen strong anti-alcohol messages out of the [Trump] Administration.” In January, the administration released updated dietary guidelines that no longer specified a daily limit for alcohol consumption. 

Dr. Mehmet Oz, who leads the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, said at the time that alcohol is a “social lubricant that brings people together.” 

“In the best-case scenario, I don’t think you should drink alcohol, but it does allow people an excuse to bond and socialize, and there’s probably nothing healthier than having a good time with friends in a safe way,” he said. The World Health Organization, supported by emerging research, has asserted that no amount of alcohol is safe for health. 

In the town of Nipomo on the central coast of California, in Bill Waycott's fields, lettuces of the future are taking root. Red-furled or dark-leaved, these rosettes of crunchy goodness might someday make it to a store near you. 

Waycott is an independent plant breeder, one of the small community of dedicated folks who devote their time and effort to the reproduction of a given plant or plants. For decades, he's focused mainly on breeding better lettuces, and he spoke to TIME about what could be in America's salad bowls in coming years and just how damaging the recent Cyclospora outbreak, traced to a farm run by greens behemoth Taylor Farms in Mexico, has been for lettuce growers.

TIME: How did you intertwine your fate with that of lettuce?

Waycott: My introduction to agriculture occurred as a Peace Corps volunteer in India in the ‘70s. When I came back from that assignment, I wanted to dedicate myself to agriculture. It was the most amazing thing that could ever have happened to me—a California surfer goes to India and learns how to survive in a language, in a culture, in a food system that I had no clue about. I got a job at the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] and the first year and a half it was a sugar beet breeding project. When the lettuce position opened up, I jumped on it.

We were trying to slow down the process of early flowering in lettuce. You probably know that it doesn't last very long in a garden during warm temperatures. It goes to seed pretty quickly. But then we had George Bush Senior come across and clear the deck. I was laid off at that point with a lot of my colleagues back in the '90s, and that's when I went to work for a private breeding company.

In your decades of making lettuce better, what’s been the main focus? 

Well, you know it's 96% water to start with, so you don't have a lot to work with. My focus has been as much as possible on disease resistance—developing lettuces that can stand up to plant diseases that can wipe out a crop—and improved nutrition. Since so many people eat salads these days, even if we were able to improve the nutrition by 5 or 10%, that's a huge impact on the North American diet.

At Nipomo Seeds, which is a company my wife and I started in 2014, we’re working on a lettuce we have nicknamed “Spinach Lettuce,” because it resembles spinach both in the way it grows and also its taste (a softer, spongier, and slightly bitter eating experience). The nutritional values for most of the important nutritional components in lettuce are high in the Spinach Lettuce, especially when compared to iceberg; there’s a lot more fiber, protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, and vitamin A.

There are others; we have some new lettuces that we're hoping growers will take an interest in. We've been growing field trials, and Chef Dan Barber from Row 7 Seeds has come out to California and looked at them. I think in September we're going to have somebody from Whole Foods come over and have a look.

What’s the biggest challenge facing lettuce breeders these days?

I have to say, I am just flabbergasted by the number of diseases that have come in in the last five to 10 years, and the rapidity with which they're mutating and forming new races. Example: I have been testing for plants that can resist Fusarium oxysporum, which is a fungus of the roots and vascular tissue. The plant's growing along, it's getting close to harvest, and then it just sort of wilts. Pull up the roots, and you see this discoloration. I really did my best to come up with resistance to that issue over the last five or so years. But in the last two years, the disease has changed and formed a new what we call variant race. So all the seed that I produced for that particular issue is no longer interesting to my customers because it doesn't have the brand-new race resistance.

Right now we have three fungi, one bacterium, and one virus here in California lettuce that are wreaking havoc and making life very difficult. In the past, there was one major issue at a time that we could hopefully solve in five years of breeding. Now I'm working on five issues, six issues in tandem. 

How has the Cyclospora outbreak, linked to Taylor Farms’ operations in Mexico, affected the lettuce industry?

Oh, it's disastrous. I've heard sales are at least 30% down, and not just in lettuce. Anything that's green is suspect to some people. If you can't cook it, or buy it out of a can, it’s not on the list. There are fields of mature lettuces being plowed under constantly now that have no value because they can't sell. 

But this isn’t the first time. In 2006, there was a big E. coli outbreak with spinach. That started the whole system of trying to evaluate the product before it was cut. Nowadays, at least north of the border, there are companies that go into every field and sample methodically across the field. Maybe every 30th row or every 50th row, they sample and send these samples into a lab, and it's checked for pathogens. 

Is there a safer way to grow lettuce? Hydroponically, with filtered water?

The hydroponic systems are so expensive—if they were really going to change things, it would have happened by now. 

But there isn't really that much difference; the plant is exposed to the atmosphere, and whatever's in the atmosphere is going to somehow affect the plant. Open field production is the cheapest way to go. Using water, either from wells or from canals, is really the only system available. And when you're looking at production the size of what North America requires, there's nowhere [big enough where] you can filter that water and create a sterile environment for the plant to grow in. It's impossible. But you can at least sample all those components that are going into it, and try your best to avoid any major contamination. 

What are you looking forward to in the future of lettuce?

I hope that we can slowly get to the point where we're improving nutrition. The world right now is pretty chaotic. How does diet fit into all that? How do people make decisions about what they're going to eat? What is the ratio of home cooking to restaurant dining, and financial stability—how does that influence the diet that they choose to use? It is tough. So working on making things more nutritious is an important factor. Hopefully, the growers and the shippers and the marketers agree, and we will bring healthier food into the system, so that people don't even have to decide at the moment of purchase if they should or not, because it's already more nutritious. 

Click here to see TIME's full list of Longevity Leaders

Shinya Yamanaka goes for a run almost every morning. So do a lot of people—but the habit carries extra weight when done by a Nobel-winning scientist whose discovery forms the foundation for one of the most exciting areas of longevity research today: reprogramming human cells to make them act younger. When someone like that makes a daily habit of anything, you take notice. 

Yamanaka had just come back from a run in late July, during one of Kyoto's worst heatwaves, when he sat down with senior health correspondent Alice Park to talk about his career and the influence he’s had on the rapidly expanding longevity field 20 years after his landmark discovery. He is one of TIME’s 2026 Longevity Leaders highlighted in this week’s issue: 12 trailblazers marking the way to a longer, healthier life.

We set out to find some of the most innovative leaders who are starting to show concrete results in helping us to live longer, better. A few pioneering scientists—like Harvard geneticist David Sinclair and Altos Labs’ Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte—have put their own spin on Yamanaka’s discovery. They’re on a mission to reverse cellular aging in different parts of the human body. Others have stepped up to separate snake oil from legitimate science. Jamie Justice, for instance, runs XPrize Healthspan, a $101 million longevity science fair that is funding the most promising research around the world. And some are addressing the equally important question of how our society should change to accommodate an older population. AARP CEO Myechia Minter-Jordan, for example, is leading the group into a new era of aging advocacy. 

We are squarely in a longevity boom, and the field is now well established as serious science. But we are still near the beginning. Right now, there is no proven longevity drug you can take to make yourself live longer. (That we know of: Nir Barzilai, who thinks some existing drugs could be repurposed as longevity-boosting treatments, is eager to change that.) Some things are within your control, however. You can exercise, like Yamanaka; build muscle, which Dr. Gabrielle Lyon calls the “organ of longevity”; and strengthen your social ties, which Dr. Robert Waldinger has learned are crucial from directing the world’s longest study of human happiness. TIME’s 12 Longevity Leaders know that all of these approaches—medical, physical, social—are key in the quest to live as well as possible for as long as possible.

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere do a lot of damage—heat waves, droughts, wildfires, superstorms. Now it appears there’s another knock-on effect that had never before been measured. According to a new study in the journal Air Quality, Atmosphere and Health, the changing chemistry of the atmosphere could be leading to changing chemistry in our blood—with potentially dangerous effects.

If CO2 is indeed messing with our blood, it’s no wonder. During the early rise of Homo sapiens, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere measured a consistent 280 parts per million (ppm). Those conditions prevailed until roughly the middle of the 18th century when the Industrial Revolution began pouring greenhouse gasses into the air from factory smokestacks.  By 1900, CO2 levels had risen to nearly 300 ppm; by 1980, that figure had jumped to nearly 330 ppm. Since then the numbers have exploded, standing at 425 ppm today.

That’s very bad news for the health of the planet—and equally bad for the health of our bodies. Every breath we take—indoors or out—draws in more carbon dioxide than our bodies were originally adapted to cope with. To determine just what the impact of this is, environmental geoscientist Phil Bierwirth, of Australian National University in Canberra, and environmental health scientist Alexander Larcombe, of Curtin University, took advantage of a 21-year survey—from 1999 to 2020—conducted by the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), during which government investigators sampled the blood of 7,000 subjects every other year to see how the body responded to all manner of environmental pollutants. 

The period the NHANES researchers surveyed was a particularly bad one for the planet when it comes to carbon dioxide emissions, since in just those 21 years, U.S. CO2 levels rose from 369 ppm to 420 ppm. In their work, Bierwirth and Larcombe were looking for rising levels of serum bicarbonate, a chemical marker associated with rising levels of CO2—and they found just that, with a 7% jump in bicarbonate over the 21 years.

Much in the way oceans can become more acidic as they absorb more carbon dioxide, the same can be said for blood. “Bicarbonate,” said Larcombe in an email to TIME, “is the body's main chemical ‘shock absorber’ for keeping blood from becoming too acidic, and a rising level is an indicator of the body compensating for more CO2.”

But bicarbonate can do only so much, and even over relatively small stretches, higher levels of CO2 in the blood can take a toll. “From short-term studies at moderately elevated CO2 (the sort of levels common in poorly ventilated rooms),” wrote Larcombe, “that means headache, tiredness, and declines in concentration and decision-making. Over longer periods, animal studies raise the possibility of oxidative stress, inflammation, tissue calcification in the kidneys and arteries, and effects on bone.”

At the same time bicarbonate levels have been rising in the blood, calcium and phosphorus levels have been falling, the study found. In addition to producing higher levels of bicarbonate, the body responds to rising carbon dioxide by drawing CO2 molecules out of the blood and storing them in bones in the form of carbonate—an ion composed of one carbon atom and three oxygen atoms. Phosphorus and calcium, which assist in this process, are drawn from blood into bone as well.

“Falling calcium and phosphorus in blood is what you'd broadly expect if that [CO2] storage process were being asked to do more work,” says Larcombe. Here too, bodily functions may suffer. “Low calcium (hypocalcaemia) produces muscle cramps, lethargy, numbness and tingling in the fingers, and disturbances of heart rhythm. Low phosphorus (hypophosphataemia) can lead to weakness, fatigue and impaired oxygen delivery.” The good news is, we’re not there yet, with Larcombe stressing that such symptoms would occur only at “much higher CO2 concentrations than today’s atmosphere.”

What’s more, at the moment, our bodies are doing a good job of adjusting to the level of CO2 that does exist in the atmosphere—even if just barely—since most people are not experiencing the warning symptoms Larcombe describes. But the famed CO2 hockey stick—the y-axis graph that shows greenhouse gasses and global temperatures steadily rising—is pushing us ever further into the danger zone. 

As with so much concerning the environment, it will be young people who will pay the highest price for the mess preceding generations have made. Not only are growing bodies more susceptible to environmental toxins, but babies born into the current world will be alive for more of the latter decades in which atmospheric CO2 will be at its highest—assuming more stringent curbs on greenhouse emissions are not put in place now. Most projections call for atmospheric CO2 concentrations to reach 500-plus PPM by mid-century, a level that will exceed tolerable carbon dioxide levels in the blood, Larcombe says. 

The answer—again and always—is to undertake the hard work of curbing greenhouse gas output before anything like those astronomical levels of CO2 are reached. That’s not a job many decision makers in high-polluting countries have shown any consistent willingness to take on—the result being that the world has now briefly breached well-intentioned stop signs like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s proposal to limit global temperatures to no more than 2°C above those of pre-industrial levels. The problem is emissions and temperature limits are not the only ones in play here; so too are biological ones.

“I think that what we are seeing is because our bodies are not adapting,” said Bierwirth in a statement that accompanied the release of the study. “Maybe we can never adapt.”

Correction, Aug. 20

The original version of this story misspelled a scientist's surname, and misstated his university affiliation. It is Alexander Larcombe not Lacrombe. He works at Curtin University, not the University of Western Australia.

At one of their first dinners together, Lindsey Hall watched the man she was dating take enormous bites, talk with his mouth full, and—horror of horrors—burp loudly without seeming to register it. The evening was supposed to feel romantic. Instead, Hall remembers thinking: “Have I made a mistake?”

She tried to dismiss his behavior as a minor incompatibility. But it continued, meal after meal, and gradually soured her feelings and attraction toward him. Table manners had never seemed like a priority until then. “I didn’t realize how important it was to me until I dated someone who just … doesn’t have it,” Hall says.

Terrible table manners might sound like a trivial complaint. But eating is one of the most routine things we do with other people, and a habit that inspires disgust three times a day can quickly become difficult to shrug off. The challenge is figuring out whether—and how—to address bad dining habits without making the person feel humiliated.

Here’s what psychologists and etiquette experts suggest.

First, consider whether the behavior is actually rude

Table manners can feel like universal rules, but they’re shaped by culture, family, and upbringing. “We talk about them as though they’re laws of physics,” says Gwenhwyfar Dunne-Henry, a psychologist in Dubai and author of Unbind Me: How to Break the Rules That Keep You Small. “They’re not. They’re social agreements.”

Before correcting someone, think about whether they’re being inconsiderate or simply behaving differently from the way you were taught. Slurping noodles, eating with your hands, and keeping your elbows on the table, for example, can carry different meanings depending on where and how someone grew up.

That doesn’t mean you have to enjoy every habit you encounter. Talking while chewing, spraying food, or sharing utensils while sick can interfere with other people’s comfort or hygiene, says Virginia Chow, a clinical psychologist in Montreal. The point is to understand exactly what’s bothering you—and avoid turning a difference in upbringing into a judgment about someone’s character.

That’s especially important because people rarely react only to the offending behavior. “We argue about what we think it means,” Dunne-Henry says. Someone chews with their mouth open, and you might start thinking they’re selfish, oblivious, or disrespectful. “If they don’t notice this,” she says, “what else don’t they notice?”

Sometimes the habit also becomes a symbol of every other irritation in the relationship. Perhaps the person also interrupts you, leaves messes behind, and routinely takes the last helping without asking. Suddenly, as Dunne-Henry puts it, “the bread roll is carrying a lot of emotional responsibility.”

Hall experienced that escalation firsthand. Once her former partner’s table manners began bothering her, she started noticing every other habit that irritated her. “I think you just start becoming hypercritical,” she says—a reaction she disliked in herself. 

Decide whether it’s your place to say something

Correcting another adult’s table manners is inherently awkward, so Stayce Wagner, a business-etiquette consultant in Jacksonville, Fla., recommends letting an isolated lapse go. Everyone occasionally speaks before swallowing or reaches all the way across the table for something. A repeated habit is different—but even then, your relationship with the person matters most.

A partner or child is one thing. A close relative or trusted friend might also appreciate knowing, particularly if you have the kind of relationship in which you would alert each other to spinach in your teeth. But correcting an acquaintance, coworker, or stranger is rarely worth the embarrassment it could cause.

“Correcting the terrible table manners of someone who isn’t your partner—or your child—is social and relationship dynamite,” Wagner says. Most people ultimately decide whether they can tolerate the habit, find a way around it, or stop sharing meals with the person.

Chow suggests asking yourself whether the behavior is truly affecting you or merely annoying you. “Not every annoyance requires a conversation,” she says. With a stranger, speaking up generally only makes sense when there’s a legitimate health or safety concern—someone who is visibly sick using a shared serving utensil, for example. In that case, focus on solving the immediate problem rather than critiquing their manners: “Would you mind using a clean serving spoon? I’d really appreciate it.”

Bring it up away from the table

If you do decide to say something, resist correcting the person in the moment—particularly if other people are present. “It’s a soul-crushing experience for most people to have their manners corrected in public,” Wagner says.

Instead, choose a private, neutral moment when neither of you is eating. Ask permission to broach an uncomfortable subject, and then describe one specific behavior. Avoid sweeping declarations like “Your table manners are disgusting” or “You eat like an animal.” Those statements turn a changeable habit into an indictment of the entire person.

Chow suggests phrasing it like this: “Can I mention something a little awkward? I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but sometimes when you’re talking while eating, a bit of food comes out. I figured you’d probably want to know because I’d want someone to tell me.”

That wording assumes the person isn’t doing it intentionally and gives them a face-saving reason to hear you out: You’re sharing information they might want to have, not delivering a verdict on their upbringing.

When the habit is directly affecting your ability to enjoy meals together, Wagner recommends being honest about it—without describing the person as repulsive. Try: “I know you don’t realize it, but sometimes you talk with food in your mouth, and I find it affects my ability to enjoy the meal. Would you be open to me pointing it out when it happens?”

The distinction is small but important: You’re explaining how the behavior affects you, rather than insisting that your standards are objectively correct.

Hall says she wishes she had been that straightforward. At first, she tried making jokes or telling her partner that she couldn’t understand him while his mouth was full—an approach she now suspects sounded passive-aggressive. “I wish I had been a little bit more direct about how much it was affecting my attraction,” she says. 

Agree on how you’ll handle it next time

Table manners are habits, which means one conversation probably won’t make a lifelong behavior disappear. If the person is receptive, ask how they’d like you to alert them if it happens again. You might agree on a word, gesture, or subtle signal that won’t embarrass them in front of other people.

In less intimate relationships, Wagner recommends finding subtle, polite ways to avoid encouraging the behavior. If someone begins answering a question immediately after taking a bite, for example, you could say: “Take your time and enjoy your food—I can wait.”

What’s unlikely to help, meanwhile, is glaring, recoiling, kicking someone under the table, or making snide remarks. “Jokes, sarcasm, public corrections, or visibly expressing disgust probably won’t change the behavior in the long run,” Wagner says. “But it will damage the relationship.”

Even the most tactful conversation might embarrass the person; there’s no magic phrase that makes criticism delightful to receive. “The goal is to not intentionally embarrass or insult them,” Wagner says.

Know when to adapt instead

Sometimes the kindest and easiest choice is to work around the behavior. Wagner has encountered friends and colleagues who double-dipped, for example, but she never corrected them. She simply ordered her own appetizer or transferred what she wanted to a separate plate before they began eating. The behavior bothered her, but she decided the relationships mattered more.

That calculus changes when the offender is a partner and the habit makes you dread eating together. If you’ve raised the issue respectfully and the person repeatedly dismisses your discomfort, the problem may no longer be their chewing. It may be that you don’t feel heard or considered—and that’s a larger conversation.

That, Hall says, was ultimately the problem in her relationship. Her partner didn’t merely struggle to change an ingrained habit; he dismissed her concern as evidence that she was too demanding. “He didn’t really value how I felt about it,” she says.

Etiquette, after all, isn’t really about mastering a complicated rulebook. Instead of tallying another person’s violations, Dunne-Henry suggests asking yourself a simpler question: “How easy am I to share a meal with?” That standard applies to everyone at the table. It means extending some grace when another person’s habits annoy you—and caring enough to listen when someone you love tells you that one of yours is making meals difficult. 

Cancer treatments have been veering toward more personalized approaches that recruit the immune system, and the latest results involving an mRNA-based therapy and an immunotherapy show that combining them may result in significant benefit for certain cancer patients.

In a release, the two companies report that people with melanoma who received intismeran, jointly developed by Moderna and Merck, and Merck’s pembrolizumab (Keytruda), lived longer without any recurrence of their cancer, as well as had fewer incidences of their cancer spreading, compared to those receiving Keytruda alone, which is the current standard treatment. Combining the two therapies seems to lead to better outcomes in this later-stage trial. Intismeran is not yet approved, while Keytruda was first approved to treat melanoma in 2014, and in 2019 to treat melanoma in people after tumors were removed. The current study included people in this latter group with stage 2 to stage 4 melanoma who were treated with either intismeran and Keytruda or Keytruda alone after surgeons removed the bulk of their tumors.

“What we’re trying to do here is to tell the immune system that it missed the signature of the tumor cell if you have cancer,” Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells TIME of intismeran. “This product basically allows us to teach the immune system about the mutation in your cancer that allows the cancer to grow.”

The study involved 1,137 people with stage 2 to stage 4 melanoma who received surgery then were randomly assigned to receive either the combination of therapies or Keytruda for just over a year. Intismeran is the first of its kind autogene therapy that relies on studying a patient’s cancer mutations, making mRNA sequences of those mutations and giving them back to the patient in so their immune systems can recognize the tumor signals in the same way it would a virus—in what's known as a therapeutic vaccine. One of the advantages of the mRNA platform is its ability to generate such genetic sequences relatively quickly, in a matter of weeks, which is essential for scaling up more personalized cancer treatment approaches. Keytruda works by unveiling the cancer cells, which can often hide from the immune system since they start out as normal cells before picking up mutations that make them grow out of control.

The companies did not provide specific details about the recurrence or survival rates, but earlier this year reported at ASCO, a major cancer conference, from an earlier stage study that showed that the combination lowered the risk of recurring melanoma by 49% and lowered the risk of distant spread of the cancer or death by 59%.

The latest results bring some good news to Moderna, which has seen its stock drop after reaching highs during the COVID pandemic following development of the first mRNA vaccine, against SARS-CoV-2. In 2025, Bancel laid off 10% of the workforce, amounting to 500 to 800 employees worldwide, after a combination of sagging sales from the COVID shot and loss of important government contracts to develop pandemic flu vaccines based on mRNA technology. In August, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first mRNA flu shot, developed by Moderna, but only after initially refusing to review the company’s submission.

Bancel says that Moderna is also exploring using intismeran alone, perhaps in earlier stage cancers. For the current trial, because intismeran is still an experimental therapy under study, and an approved therapy, Keytruda, does exist for melanoma patients, regulators at the FDA were more comfortable with combining the drugs so every patient received at least the standard of care and therefore would not be additionally harmed by joining the study. “It would be unethical for us to tell people to come on a study of something that we don’t know if it works, when people are fighting for their lives,” he says. “That’s why we did the study together with Keytruda, which can improve outcomes, and we tried to show that the combination was better, and we did.”

Bancel’s teams are already studying intismeran in stage 1 lung cancer, to see if using it earlier, and priming the immune system, can lead to equally beneficial outcomes for those people. In lung cancer, standard treatment involves surgery and careful monitoring for any signs of returning cancer, so doctors can ethically study how adding intismeran for some patients affects their cancer outcomes compared to those not receiving it. While that study is still in early stages, Bancel is optimistic since “from a scientific standpoint there is no scientific sense that it would work in melanoma and not work in another tumor type,” he says of the mRNA-based approach. “I think it will be transformational. Think about if you get a screening X-ray and find stage 1 lung cancer. Then you get intismeran, which is like a vaccine so you have no severe toxicity like with other immunotherapy. Think about getting this product on your way to work, or even [potentially] at your local pharmacy—that would be an incredible change in care. And it can help reduce the risk of metastasis, and have a profound impact on patients, as well as prevent people from getting very severe disease.”

Moderna is also studying intismeran in stage 3 lung cancer, and hoping to see similarly encouraging results as they did in melanoma patients. And its scientists are studying the compound in kidney, pancreas, and bladder cancers in nine ongoing studies, says Bancel.

“Because of all the things we learned over the years in the field of immunology, we believe this molecule will be used in many different cancer types,” he says.

Correction, Aug. 19

The original version of the story misstated which companies developed intismeran. It was jointly developed by Moderna and Merck, not solely by Moderna.