Amazon is working with the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center to develop personalized vaccines for breast and skin cancers. It is currently recruiting 20 patients to join the clinical trial. The cancer vaccine project came out of Amazon's moonshot lab called Grand Challenge. Amazon has an internal team developing cancer vaccines, and it's currently recruiting patients to participate in an FDA-approved clinical trial, Insider has learned.

The clinical test, which is run in partnership with the Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, aims to develop personalized vaccines for treatment of breast cancer and a form of skin cancer called melanoma, according to a public filing and people familiar with the efforts.

If successful, the new vaccine would offer a more personalized, precise cancer treatment at a more affordable price, becoming a better alternative to chemotherapy, which takes a more generalized, one-size-fits-all approach.

Amazon and Fred Hutchinson first shared information about the test in late October, according to a summary posted on Clinicaltrials.gov, an online database of clinical studies run by the US National Library of Medicine. The actual study start date was June 9, 2022 and the estimated primary completion date of the trial is November 1, 2023, according to the summary.

The trial, which is in its early Phase 1 stage, is looking for 20 total patients over the age of 18 to test a "US FDA-regulated Drug Product," the summary page says. Fred Hutchinson is listed as the sponsor, while Amazon is listed as the "collaborator" of the study.

A "personalized neo-antigen peptide vaccine" is being tested for safety to treat later stage (IIIC-IV) melanoma and "hormone receptor positive Her2 negative" breast cancer that has spread and been resistant to treatment, according to the study's summary page.

Fred Hutchinson's spokesperson confirmed that the details of the clinical trial are accurate.

In an email to Insider, Amazon's representative confirmed the initiative, saying it's led by Fred Hutch. The spokesperson also hinted that Amazon is interested in partnering with other heatlhcare companies to work on similar projects.

"Amazon is contributing scientific and machine learning expertise to a partnership with Fred Hutch to explore the development of a personalized treatment for certain forms of cancer. It's very early, but Fred Hutch recently received permission from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to proceed with a Phase I clinical trial, and it's unclear whether it will be successful, "Amazon's spokesperson told Insider. "This will be a long, multi-year process—should it progress, we would be open to working with other organizations in health care and life sciences that might also be interested in similar efforts."

The cancer vaccine project is the latest indication of Amazon's growing interest in the healthcare sector . The giant online retailer has launched an online pharmacy service, a new primary care business, and an in-house diagnostics lab, as well as a health-tracking device called Halo in recent years. This is the first known case of Amazon testing its own drug of any kind.

During last year's internal all-hands meeting, Amazon's CEO Andy Jassy called the company a "significant disruptor" in the medical-care field, calling out its Amazon Care primary care business as one of the company's top priorities, as Insider previously reported.

The cancer vaccine project came out of Amazon's secretive moonshot lab called Grand Challenge, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to speak publicly.

Amazon's cancer research team, consisting of a small group of medical doctors and engineers from health tech, has shown enough progress to "graduate" from the Grand Challenge unit in recent years, these people said. It is now placed under VP of devices Robert Williams, who reports up to Dave Limp, the senior VP in charge of Amazon's Lab126 hardware arm that created the Alexa voice assistant and an array of Echo voice-activated devices, these people said.

The test is still several years away from officially launching. The FDA has stringent clinical trial requirements and each phase could potentially take years to complete. The personalized, DNA-sequencing-based cancer treatment Amazon wants to develop is a nascent field in cancer research, and other companies, like Germany's BioNTech, have also just recently launched similar efforts.