With Its New Genomics Data Services, AWS Hopes to Facilitate Rapid Advances in Precision Medicine

Developing a deeper understanding of biology and the human genome has the potential to transform how diseases are treated. Standing in the way of this progress are challenges posed by the scale and complexity of data required to accelerate such advances.

With the recent launch of AWS Omics, Amazon Web Services is using artificial intelligence, machine learning and other AWS and partner products and services to speed the translation of this data into actionable intelligence. Insights generated from the data can then be used to facilitate precision medicine and advance scientific discoveries.

The service will help bioinformaticians, researchers and scientists store, analyze and generate more valuable insights from genomic, transcriptomic and other omics data.

Clinicians will be able to query thousands of variants across genes at once to understand how genomic variation coupled with corresponding clinical data may affect human health or predict clinical outcomes, according to AWS. The platform also supports large-scale analysis and collaborative research.

Amazon Omics has three primary components:

• Omics-optimized storage that helps customers store and share their data efficiently and at low cost.
• Managed compute-for-bioinformatics workflows that allow customers to run the exact analysis they specify without worrying about provisioning underlying infrastructure.
• Optimized data stores for population-scale variant analysis.

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia now uses Amazon Omics to power its genomics projects to get a more comprehensive view of patients so that the best possible care can be delivered, Jeff Pennington, associate vice president and chief research informatics officer, told Fierce Healthcare. “Combining multiple clinical modalities is foundational to achieving this. With Amazon Omics, we can expand our understanding of our patients’ health, all the way down to their DNA,” Pennington said.