Biotech company Moderna Therapeutics is leveraging its partnership with Amazon Web Service to develop personalized cancer vaccines, CEO Stephane Bancel told CNBC's Jim Cramer.
Moderna Therapeutics is conducting clinical trials for mRNA, a single-stranded molecule that creates protein in cells, to develop the vaccines. However, AWS is speeding up that process.
"We have a phase two study going on where we are designing every product for every patient," Mr. Bancel told Mr. Cramer in a "Mad Money" interview Jan. 15. "So, we start by taking a biopsy of a cancer, we next-gen sequence it, we next-gen sequence a healthy cell of a body [and] we send everything to AWS [to] compare every letter of a DNA…of a healthy cell and a cancer cell, and from that we deduce what do we need to do in our product just for your cancer."
The company is using the cloud platform to test dozens of drugs, with seven currently undergoing clinical trial studies. This nontraditional way of creating medicine creates new possibilities for drug discovery, according to Mr. Bancel.
"Once you figure out how to make it work once … then you can have a lot of new products come in very quickly and the return on investments is very spectacular because you don't have to reinvent everything," he said. "You just fly."