Analyzing the genomic and biological data of entire populations may help unlock the information needed to develop the most effective new drugs and other treatments. It’s more easily said than done, however, thanks to the immense amount of computing power required to sift through the cell makeup of any significant number of people.
Enter Amazon. The tech giant’s Amazon Web Services segment unveiled a new cloud computing service this week directed specifically at solving that problem, giving researchers and scientists in life sciences and healthcare a sturdier option for storing and analyzing mass amounts of individual health data.
The new service has been dubbed Amazon Omics, according to a Tuesday blog post from Channy Yun, a principal developer advocate at AWS. It’s now available to AWS customers covered by a handful of the company’s existing service zones around the world, including those in Northern Virginia, Oregon, Ireland, London, Frankfurt and Singapore.
With Amazon Omics, researchers will be able to upload petabytes’ worth of genomic, transcriptomic, proteomic and other so-called “omics” data to the cloud—representing hundreds of thousands of humans.
Beyond simply offering a secure, low-cost place to store, access and share that data, the platform can also be used to perform analyses, Yun wrote. Its built-in analytics tools and machine learning algorithms can quickly standardize all of the uploaded data into a single, easy-to-process format.
From there, researchers can quickly run searches on the compiled omics data, looking for specific variants, gene expressions and other differences in DNA. The results of those queries can then be used with other AWS tools, like the Amazon SageMaker machine learning platform, to train artificial intelligence algorithms to recognize patterns in the data that could help pinpoint connections between an individual’s genetic makeup and a disease diagnosis.
Additionally, the platform automatically adapts to provide more or less computing power based on the amount of information uploaded and the types of analyses run on the data.
In the blog post, Yun detailed the handful of AWS life science and healthcare customers already using the Amazon Omics platform, including the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, G42 Healthcare, Lifebit and C2i Genomics.
Amazon has made a point recently of upping its health-focused cloud offerings. Last year, AWS followed in the footsteps of competitors Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure to launch a healthcare-specific service.
AWS for Health is designed to provide a set of tech tools that could help customers in medtech, biopharma, genomics, medical research and more speed up the development of drugs and other therapeutics, improve their understanding of human health and disease, and forge collaborations across the industry. Among the early adopters of the platform was Moderna, which has relied on Amazon’s cloud services to help develop its COVID-19 vaccine, among other drug development programs.