AWS launches Amazon Omics for precision medicine

"The cloud-based platform provides security, scale and the processing power needed for genomic data storage and analyses, eliminating the need for specialized infrastructure and workflows.

To enhance clinical insights at the point of care and help identify the best treatment or prevention options for patients, Amazon Web Services has launched a service that utilizes artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and other AWS and partner products and services to run IT-heavy bioinformatics workflows.

Clinicians can query thousands of variants across many genes at once to understand how genomic variation, joined with corresponding clinical data, may affect human health or predict clinical outcomes, according to the AWS announcement.

Tehsin Syed, AWS' general manager of health AI, and Dr. Taha Kass-Hout, vice president of machine learning and chief medical officer at AWS, say in their blog post that it's the size, rapid accumulation, complexity and heterogeneity of data that challenge existing computational tools used in precision medicine and research.

AWS built Amazon Omics to support large-scale genomic analysis and collaborative research for two main reasons, the company says:

Generating insights from genomic, transcriptomic and other omics data poses difficulties for existing tools and systems trying to manage these workflows, Syed and Kass-Hout explained.
The level of data required for sequencing also presents privacy, security, data ownership, governance and fairness challenges for the healthcare and life sciences sectors and must exist in a secure, compliant environment.
Amazon Omics users can reduce time spent on setting up and running complex Extract-Transform-Load pipelines by natively storing data in optimized query-ready formats (like Apache Parquet) and APIs. They do not need to focus on provisioning the underlying infrastructure to operate their bioinformatics programs..." Lire la suite