The CEO of Moderna Inc. (NASDAQ: MRNA) just purchased $5 million of stock in the open market. This is very significant since most of the insider trades have been sales for the past year.
On March 4, 2025, filings revealed that CEO Stephane Bancel purchased 160,314 shares of MRNA stock between $31.04 and $31.53, worth approximately $5 million. Bancel put his “money where his mouth is," which sent shares higher by 5.6% on the news.
Moderna stock has been trading near five-year lows, but Bancel’s trade may have helped put the floor in the stock and inspired confidence with investors in this medical sector's former highflyer.
Here are four reasons CEO Bancel may have been motivated to buy a small fortune in this stock in the open market.
1) Moderna Stock Is Trading at a Deep Value
One of the obvious reasons for insider buying is the belief that the stock is oversold and presents a value that can’t be walked away from. Moderna shares are trading near five-year lows not seen since the pandemic days in March 2020. MRNA stock surged from these levels up toward an all-time high of $497.49 on August 9, 2021, as it developed its COVID-19 vaccine Spikevax.
Even now, the stock is trading at just 4.29x sales (which is under the 7.5x industry average) and 1.26x book value. Its price-sales ratio reached a high of 145x in 2020. Today, Moderna has $9.5 billion in cash, which is $24.61 per share.
2) Moderna’s Covid and RSV Franchises Still Generate Revenues
While Moderna’s COVID treatment sales have long peaked, they are still generating revenues.
In its fourth quarter of 2025, Moderna reported $923 million in Spikevax sales, comprised of $244 million in the United States and $679 million internationally. Spikevax generated $3.1 billion in total sales for 2024. Its respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine, mRESVIA, generated $15 million in Q4 sales and $25 million in full-year 2024 sales.
The company has also submitted its next-generation COVID-19 vaccine and RSV vaccine for high-risk adults ages 18 to 59 and its combination flu/COVID-19 vaccine for FDA approval.
3) Moderna’s Cancer Vaccines Look Promising
Moderna has been utilizing its messenger-RNA technology on personalized cancer vaccines. Its mRNA-4157, in collaboration with Merck & Co. (NYSE: MRK) and its blockbuster Keytruda, has proven to cut melanoma recurrence risk by 49%. A late-stage trial for its V940 skin cancer melanoma treatment is now fully enrolled, with an FDA approval target date of 2027.
If the cancer vaccine study is positive, it can open the door to other types of personalized cancer treatments. Moderna's President Stephen Hoge stated, “As you know, and as I mentioned, there are additional Phase 3s as well as two randomized Phase 2s, including bladder cancer and renal cell carcinoma, which, depending on the rate of approval of events, could have readouts that we would be updating on as well in the coming years.”
4) Moderna Is Focused on 10 Drug Approvals With a TAM of More Than $30 Billion
Much of the sell-off in Moderna through the end of 2024 was due to cost cuts in its research and development. Moderna also trimmed its forward guidance to $1.5 billion to $2.5 billion of vaccine sales in 2025. This was slashed from 2024 sales of $3.2 billion of revenue in 2024.
While the market took this as bad news on the surface, the goal was to focus its resources on the lower-hanging fruit to develop drugs that could get FDA approval. This narrowed Moderna's pipeline to focus on 10 drugs expected to get FDA approvals by 2027. This is critical because that’s when the cash runway could come to an end.
It’s a race against time that the CEO recently bet $5 million that it can win. In fact, the $5 million purchase of 160,314 shares was just a tiny sliver of his holdings, as CEO Bancel owns a total of 21.23 million shares of Moderna.
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