As healthcare becomes increasingly digitized, scientists, doctors and researchers must try to decipher unprecedented amounts of data to adequately personalize care. The glut of information available to these experts often outstrips their ability to consume and analyze it. Amazonthe cloud unit is working to fill this gap.
Amazon Web Services recently launched general availability for Amazon Omics, which helps researchers store and analyze omic data such as DNA, RNA, and protein sequences. The service provides customers with the basic infrastructure they need to make sense of large amounts of data so they can spend more time on new scientific discoveries.
AWS generates a significant portion of Amazon’s revenue, bringing in $20.5 billion in the third quarter. The cloud computing business is expanding in healthcare, and while AWS did not disclose revenue estimates for specific services, the size of the global genomic data analysis market is expected to reach $2.15 billion by 2030, according to a Straits Research report .
Dr. Taha Kas-Hout, Chief Medical Officer at AWS, said that the majority of healthcare data is unstructured in nature, meaning that about 97% of it remains unused. Indexing and making sense of this information is challenging, especially when researchers collect omics data from tens of thousands of patients.
Before joining Amazon, Cass-Hout served two terms under President Barack Obama and was the first Chief Health Information Officer at the US Food and Drug Administration.
Sequencing a single human genome can require 80 to 150 gigabytes of storage space, Cass-Hout said, and some research projects deal with petabytes and exabytes of genomic information.
“You’re talking about almost nine Harry Potters if you want to print it on a printer,” Cass-Hout told CNBC. “And that’s just for one human being.”
Amazon Omics helps researchers sort through their data by providing them with three components that they can use individually or as a collective. Omics-compliant object storage helps researchers store and share raw sequence data; Omics Workflows helps run workflows that process raw sequence data at scale; and Omics Analytics simplifies sequence processing output.
More than a dozen customers and partners have beta tested the service and are already using Amazon Omics.
For Jeffrey Pennington, principal investigator of informatics at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, it has already had a noticeable impact.
Pennington works in the Department of Biomedical and Health Informatics, which uses data and technology to solve problems in children’s health. He said the department has spent five years expanding the infrastructure to analyze omics data, and now it’s no longer something they have to build or maintain themselves.
“We are a large pediatric academic medical center, but we are not yet large enough to learn and build everything that is needed to use omic data productively,” Pennington said. “Our time and energy, our effort, our financial resources are much better spent putting the puzzle together than generating those pieces in the first place.”
Amazon Omics also fosters collaboration between large research groups, smaller clinical groups, and intelligence and pharmaceutical companies, said Boris Oklander, co-founder and chief technology officer of C2i Genomics.
C2i is a biotech company that uses genomic data to develop a personalized smart platform for cancer treatment. Oaklander said the company participated in the beta for Amazon Omics after developing its own data analysis technology.
He said Amazon Omics has created a collaborative ecosystem that eliminates the need for researchers to build complex technology from scratch.
“We’re just democratizing,” he said. “This type of service is something that enables [us] to unlock the value of the investments that different players in this space are making.”
Other major technology companies have developed similar tools. MicrosoftCloud computing platform Azure launched Microsoft Genomics in 2018 to help researchers interpret data generated by genomic technologies. GoogleCloud Life Sciences technology also enables researchers to process biomedical data at scale.
Pennington said the Broad Institute and DNAnexus also offer popular genomic data analysis services, but said they can be difficult to maintain and can analyze fewer types of data than Amazon Omics.
Given the sensitive and deeply personal nature of omic data, Kass-Hout said protecting patient privacy and data is “job zero” for AWS. He said AWS uses more than 300 security, compliance and management services and supports 98 security standards and compliance certifications. In doing so, AWS goes “way beyond” regulatory compliance, Cass-Hout said, and also provides encryption best practice resources and tools to its customers.
Customers are also responsible for building secure applications on top of Amazon Omics services, which prevents AWS from seeing or using the data.
Kass-Hout said Amazon Omics ultimately serves as a way to efficiently index information so researchers can focus on making real advances in precision medicine.
“If the last decade was about the digitization that the healthcare and life sciences industry went through, I really believe that the next decade is about making sense of that data in ways now [where] we can find new therapies, new diagnostics, more targeted therapies,” he said.