As health care becomes increasingly digitized, scientists, doctors, and researchers face the challenge of deciphering unprecedented amounts of data to adequately personalize care.
The vast amount of information available often exceeds their capacity to consume and analyze it. Amazon’s cloud unit has been working to address this gap.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently launched Amazon Omics, now generally available, which assists researchers in storing and analyzing omic data such as sequences of DNA, RNA, and proteins.
The service provides the necessary infrastructure to manage large datasets, allowing researchers to focus on scientific discoveries.
AWS, which generated $20.5 billion in revenue in the third quarter, has been expanding into health care.
Although AWS doesn’t disclose revenue projections for specific services, the global genomic data analysis market size is expected to reach $2.15 billion by 2030, according to Straits Research.
Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, AWS’s chief medical officer, noted that the vast majority of health care data is unstructured, with about 97% going unused.
Indexing and interpreting this data is challenging, especially when collecting omic data from tens of thousands of patients.
Before joining Amazon, Kass-Hout served under President Barack Obama and was the first chief health information officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Sequencing a single human genome can require 80 to 150 gigabytes of storage, Kass-Hout explained, with some projects dealing with petabytes and exabytes of genomic data.
“You’re talking about almost nine Harry Potters worth if you want to print it on a printer,” Kass-Hout told. “And that’s just for one human being.”
Amazon Omics helps researchers manage their data through three main components: Omics-aware object storage for storing and sharing raw sequence data, Omics Workflows for processing raw sequence data at scale, and Omics Analytics to simplify the output of sequence processing.
More than a dozen customers and partners tested the beta version of the service and are already using Amazon Omics.
Jeffrey Pennington, chief research informatics officer at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has noticed a significant impact.
His department, which uses data and technology to address child health issues, spent five years developing infrastructure to analyze omics data. With Amazon Omics, they no longer need to build or maintain this infrastructure themselves.
“We’re a big pediatric academic medical center, but we’re still not big enough to learn and build everything that is required to make productive use of omic data,” Pennington said.
“Our time and energy, our effort, our financial wherewithal is much better spent putting the puzzle together rather than generating those pieces in the first place.”
Amazon Omics also promotes collaboration among large research groups, smaller clinical groups, and pharmaceutical companies, said Boris Oklander, co-founder and chief technology officer of C2i Genomics.
C2i, a biotechnology company, used genomic data to develop a personalized cancer treatment intelligence platform and participated in the beta for Amazon Omics.
Oklander said Amazon Omics fosters an ecosystem for collaboration, eliminating the need for researchers to build complex technology from scratch.
“We’re just democratizing,” he said. “This type of service is something that allows [us] to unlock the value in the investments that different players in this space are doing.”
Other major tech companies have developed similar tools. Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform Azure launched Microsoft Genomics in 2018 to help researchers interpret genomic data.
Google’s Cloud Life Sciences technology also allows researchers to process biomedical data at a large scale.
Pennington mentioned that the Broad Institute and DNAnexus offer popular genomic data analysis services but noted that they can be difficult to maintain and analyze fewer data types than Amazon Omics.
Given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of omic data, Kass-Hout emphasized that privacy and patient data protection is “job zero” for AWS. AWS uses over 300 security, compliance, and governance services and supports 98 security standards and compliance certifications.
This ensures that AWS goes “way beyond” regulatory compliance, providing best-practice resources and encryption tools to its customers.
Customers are also responsible for building secure applications on top of Amazon Omics’ services, preventing AWS from seeing or leveraging the data.
Ultimately, Kass-Hout stated, Amazon Omics is designed to efficiently index information, enabling researchers to concentrate on making real advances in precision medicine.
