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AWS Launches Tool To Manage Large-Scale Omic Data
During a re:Invent keynote spotlighting the importance of maintaining a healthy "data realm," Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced yet another new solution to wrangle large volumes of data, this one aimed at health care.
The new Amazon Omics service, designed to support "large-scale analysis and research" around medical data, is now generally available, announced AWS CEO Adam Selipsky at re:Invent this week.
Amazon Omics lets medical researchers store different types of omic data from large populations, including genomic and transcriptomic data. Then, using AWS' various data management, querying and analysis capabilities, users can generate actionable insights from that data to improve patient care, promote collaborative research and visualize trends in population groups.
"For example, you can train ML models with Amazon SageMaker to help researchers predict whether individuals are predisposed to certain diseases," AWS said in the general availability announcement. "You can also combine an individual's genome data with their medical history from Amazon HealthLake to deliver better diagnosis and personalized treatment plans."
In a separate blog post, Channy Yun, principal developer advocate at AWS, explained that the volume of omic data that medical researchers contend with frequently runs in the petabytes, making its management very complex.
"You need a way to store omics data that is cost-efficient and easy to access," he wrote. "You need to scale compute across millions of biological samples while preserving accuracy and reliability. You also need specialized tools to analyze genetic patterns across populations and train machine learning (ML) models to predict diseases."
Amazon Omics fulfills these needs, according to Yun. "With just a few clicks in the Omics console, you can import and normalize petabytes of data into formats optimized for analysis. Amazon Omics provides scalable workflows and integrated tools for preparing and analyzing omics data and automatically provisions and scales the underlying cloud infrastructure. So, you can focus on advancing science and translate discoveries into diagnostics and therapies."
Amazon Omics is currently available in AWS' regions in the US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland, London and Frankfurt) and Asia Pacific (Singapore). More information on the product, including pricing, is available here.