The mRNA cancer vaccine finally delivers

PLUS: Spirit Airlines' data turns into bidding war

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. After decades of false starts, the mRNA cancer vaccine may have found its moment — Moderna and Merck’s personalized shot is the first mRNA cancer therapy to beat an active standard of care in Phase 3.

It’s early evidence that the pandemic’s breakout technology can be aimed at the mutations inside one patient’s tumor, and melanoma is just the start.

In today’s tech rundown:

  • An mRNA cancer vaccine clears Phase 3 trials

  • Flight attendants stall Google’s data deal

  • Daniel Ek’s body scanner reaches NYC

  • Colossal’s startup factory

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

BIOTECH

Image source: Julio C. Valencia at the NCI Center for Cancer Research (melanoma)

The Rundown: Moderna and Merck’s made-to-order mRNA cancer vaccine has cleared its biggest test yet, beating Keytruda alone in a Phase 3 melanoma trial — the first late-stage win for an mRNA cancer therapy.

The details:

  • The trial had 1,137 patients whose stage IIB–IV melanoma had been removed, randomizing them 2:1 to Moderna’s vaccine plus Keytruda or Keytruda alone.

  • The vaccine — Intismeran Autogene — is manufactured for one person only; doctors sequence the tumor, then encode up to 34 of its mutations into mRNA.

  • The combo significantly improved recurrence-free and distant metastasis-free survival — patients went longer without the cancer returning or spreading.

  • Neither company released hazard ratios, confidence intervals, or survival curves; overall survival data is also not yet reported.

Why it matters: Cancer vaccines have spent decades looking better in theory than in patients. This is the first Phase 3 readout for an mRNA cancer therapy to beat an active standard of care — a year after RFK Jr. killed 22 federal mRNA vaccine contracts worth $500M. Intismeran is already in trials for lung, bladder, and kidney cancer.

GOOGLE

Image source: Wikimedia Commons / Tomás Del Coro

The Rundown: AI training startup Micro1 just made a late $12.5M offer for Spirit Airlines’ corporate archive this week, hours after a bankruptcy judge put Google’s $10M win on ice over flight attendants’ privacy objections.

The details:

  • Google won last week’s auction with a $10M bid, topping Mercor’s $7.5M offer; Micro1 has now offered $12.5M for the defunct airline’s assets.

  • The prize: 100M emails, 500M Teams messages, 30M lines of code, plus finance and ops data. Google says it could improve its products and AI models.

  • The Association of Flight Attendants says the archive also reaches deep into workers’ lives, including payroll histories and internal communications.

  • Judge Sean Lane has pushed the approval hearing to Sept. 9, giving the court time to consider those privacy objections.

Why it matters: Spirit’s archive runs to 175K employee records reaching back to 1986 and 3.4M payroll records. Google bid $10M for it, and Micro1 has now offered $12.5M, putting a price on the internal exhaust of a company that no longer exists, weeks before a judge decides whether the employees who generated it get a say.

NEKO HEALTH

Image source: Neko Health (co-founders Daniel Ek [right] and Hjalmar Nilsonne

The Rundown: Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health is bringing its technified annual physical to the U.S., opening a $499 full-body scanning clinic in Manhattan on September 24 with 25K New Yorkers already waiting to get in.

The details:

  • Neko’s first U.S. location will open at 300 Lafayette Street in SoHo, marking the Swedish startup’s first expansion beyond its clinics in Sweden and the UK.

  • The 60-minute, radiation-free scan uses Neko’s proprietary sensors, imaging, and blood tests to collect millions of health data points, reviewed by a clinician.

  • The New York scan will cost $499 out of pocket; Neko says more than 25K New Yorkers have already joined its waitlist ahead of opening day.

  • Rivals are also stacking up — Midjourney’s scanner lands in a 2027 San Francisco spa; Function Health just took $450M from General Catalyst.

Why it matters: Neko arrives in the U.S. with $700M just raised and 100K scans behind it, entering a market where Function Health, Fountain Life, and Midjourney are all building comparable consumer scanning services. Still to answer: whether scanning catches disease early enough to justify the potential false alarms and follow-ups.

COLOSSAL BIOSCIENCES

Image source: Colossal Biosciences

The Rundown: Colossal Biosciences is spinning its de-extinction tech into standalone companies — the latest, AI-biology startup Astromech, just raised $20M at a $3.8B valuation, joining biology firm Form Bio and plastic-eating-microbe startup Breaking.

The details:

  • Astromech's $20M round, led by biotech investor Bob Nelsen, brings its total funding to $60M and its valuation to $3.8B — up from a reported $2B in April.

  • The company trains AI on genomic and evolutionary data to predict how biological systems change, from drug resistance to climate shifts.

  • Form Bio launched in 2022 with a $30M Series A after software built for Colossal's own genome-engineering work proved good enough to sell.

  • Breaking launched in 2024 with $10.5M in seed funding for X-32, a plastic-degrading microbe discovered through work involving Harvard's Wyss Institute.

Why it matters: De-extinction may be Colossal’s attention machine, but the potentially bigger business is the tech it has to invent along the way. Astromech’s $3.8B valuation suggests investors already see serious value in that spillover. If Colossal can repeat the trick, its most valuable output may not be a de-extinct animal.

QUICK HITS

Oura faces a proposed class action over sleep-stage claims: its AI infers REM, deep, and light sleep from indirect sensors, not the brainwaves that clinical studies read.

Meta is rolling out Pocket — an app built on its acqui-hire of Gizmo that turns AI prompts into small touch- and tilt-responsive games published to a scrollable feed.

Senators have given TikTok until Sept. 1 to explain why it withheld a harmful-content safeguard from 15M U.S. users, including the teen who died by suicide weeks later.

A Chinese-engineered probiotic releases GLP-1 on blood-sugar spikes, matching Ozempic in animal tests, and could hit U.S. shelves in two years.

Apple appears to have accidentally leaked its upcoming iPhone lineup in macOS Tahoe code, including references to the long-rumored foldable “iPhone Ultra.”

Google is reportedly planning to shift all Pixel phone, watch, and earbud production out of China to Vietnam and India starting in 2027.

Apple is reportedly bringing back the ceramic Apple Watch case with next month's Series 12, ending a six-year absence since the material was dropped after the Series 5.

Rivian spinout Also raised $150M to turn the tech behind its e-bike into a platform for small autonomous vehicles that could move DoorDash and Amazon deliveries.

Commercial space-station startup Vast cut 46 employees, or about 4% of its workforce, just months after raising $500M to launch its first orbital station in 2027.

LandSpace landed the first stage of its Zhuque-3 rocket this week, China's first private orbital booster recovery and only its second ever.

Whoop is opening its Advanced Labs blood-testing service to all users without an extra subscription, with the Galleri multi-cancer early-detection test newly added.

That's it for today's tech rundown!

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Rowan, Zach, Shubham, Jennifer, and Nate — The Rundown’s editorial team

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