As healthcare becomes increasingly digital, scientists, doctors and researchers must attempt to decipher unprecedented amounts of information to personalize care. The abundance of knowledge available to those experts often exceeds their ability to eat and analyze it. AmazonThe corporate’s cloud unit is working to fill this gap.
Amazon web services recently launched general availability for Amazon Omics, which helps scientists store and analyze omics data reminiscent of DNA, RNA and protein sequences. The service provides customers with the essential infrastructure they need to know large amounts of information, so that they can spend more time making recent scientific discoveries.
AWS generates a significant slice of Amazon’s revenue, attracting $20.5 billion within the third quarter. The cloud computing business is expanding into healthcare, and while AWS doesn’t disclose revenue projections for individual services, the scale of the worldwide genomic data analytics market is predicted to achieve $2.15 billion by 2030. Straits study report.
Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, chief medical officer at AWS, said the overwhelming majority of healthcare data is unstructured, meaning around 97% of it stays untapped. Indexing and understanding this information is a challenge, especially when researchers collect omics data from tens of hundreds of patients.
Prior to Amazon, Kass-Hout served two terms under President Barack Obama and was the primary director of health information for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Sequencing a single human genome can require 80 to 150 gigabytes of storage, Kass-Hout said, with some research projects coping with petabytes and exabytes of genomic information.
“You are talking about Harry Potter value almost nine if you must print it on a printer,” Kass-Hout told CNBC. “And that is only for one human being.”
Amazon Omics helps scientists sort their data by providing them with three components that they’ll use individually or collectively. Omics-enabled object storage helps scientists store and share raw sequence data; Omics workflows help run workflows that process raw sequence data at scale; and Omics Analytics simplifies sequence processing output.
Over a dozen customers and partners have beta tested the service and are already using Amazon Omics.
For Jeffrey Pennington, chief research computer scientist at Kid’s Hospital of Philadelphia, this has already had a noticeable impact.
Pennington works within the biomedical and health informatics division, which uses data and technology to resolve kid’s health problems. He said the department spent five years build up its omics data analytics infrastructure, and now it’s not something they need to construct or maintain themselves.
“We’re a big pediatric academic medical center, but we’re still not sufficiently big to learn and construct the whole lot that is required to make use of omics data productively,” Pennington said. “Our time and energy, our effort, our financial resources are a lot better spent putting together a puzzle than generating those pieces in the primary place.”
Amazon Omics also encourages collaboration between large research groups, smaller clinical groups, and intelligence and pharmaceutical corporations, said Boris Oklander, co-founder and chief technology officer of C2i Genomics.
C2i is a biotech company working to make use of genomic data to develop personalized cancer treatments. Oklander said the corporate took part within the beta for Amazon Omics after developing its own data analytics technology.
He said Amazon Omics has created a collaborative ecosystem that eliminates the necessity for scientists to construct complex technology from scratch.
“We’re just democratizing,” he said. “This type of service is something that enables [us] unlock the worth of investments made by different players on this space.”
Other big tech corporations have developed similar tools. MicrosoftThe Azure cloud computing platform launched Microsoft Genomics in 2018 to assist scientists interpret the info generated by genomic technologies. GoogleCloud Life Sciences technology from Cloud also enables scientists to process biomedical data at scale.
Pennington said Broad Institute and DNAnexus also offer popular genomic data evaluation services, but said they will be difficult to take care of and may analyze fewer sorts of data than Amazon Omics.
Given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of omics data, Kass-Hout said patient privacy and data protection is “task zero” for AWS. He said AWS uses over 300 security, compliance and management services and supports 98 security standards and compliance certifications. In doing so, AWS goes “well beyond” regulatory compliance, Kass-Hout said, and in addition provides its customers with best practice resources and encryption tools.
Customers are also chargeable for constructing secure applications based on Amazon Omics services that protect AWS from data access or use.
Ultimately, Kass-Hout said Amazon Omics serves as a option to efficiently index information so researchers can deal with making real advances in precision medicine.
“If the last decade has been in regards to the digitalization that the health and life sciences industry has passed through, I really imagine the following decade shall be about understanding that data the way in which we do now. [where] we are able to find recent therapies, recent diagnostics, more targeted therapies,” he said.