Amazon welcomes White House Executive Order and affirms commitment to pediatric cancer care and research

According to the American Childhood Cancer Organization, 42 families learn that their child has been diagnosed with cancer every day in the United States. Far too often, these diagnoses are terminal—with kids having few, if any, treatment options. The same clinicians treating children with cancer are also the scientists trying to find a cure, often limited by the number of patients they can see and the data available from similar cases around the world.

Childhood Cancer Awareness Month shines a spotlight on these diseases, and offers the entire community—including patients, caregivers, clinicians, scientists, industry, and government—an opportunity to make a difference. Today marks another milestone in the efforts to combat childhood cancer with a new executive order (EO) from the White House aimed at tying together data with the most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) systems to more rapidly identify new treatment options and—ultimately—save and improve the lives of kids with a cancer diagnosis.

The EO will accelerate the use of AI for improving pediatric clinical trials, patient care, cancer research, and drug discovery. The support and adoption of robust data standards for interoperability is critical in ensuring clinicians, researchers, biopharma, and patients can access the right data at the right time for the right child when every second counts.

Today’s EO launches new policy initiatives to harness advances in health data interoperability coupled with new AI technologies to find better treatment options. As a next step, federal policymakers will develop policy changes so that children, their families, and the clinicians treating them can securely use AI on patient-specific data to find a cure.

Amazon welcomes policy actions to leverage AI and data interoperability to make scientific breakthroughs that will save lives while giving kids and their families hope. We stand ready to lend our expertise to government agencies for these proofs-of-value that use AWS services for health data interoperability, security, privacy-preserving data sharing, and applications of AI to combat cancer.

Every second counts, and every data element matters

For many years, AWS has supported data intensive efforts in pediatric cancer research, including hosting the Kids First Data Resource Center, a portal for scientific discovery with robust genetic and clinical data for pediatric cancer and congenital disorders. At the AWS Washington DC Summit in 2024, Amazon highlighted support for the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN). This 35-site consortium of pediatric centers is focused on harnessing molecular, imaging, clinical, and pathology data to power real world observational trials by merging data and AI. Through a platform built on AWS, scientists and clinicians treating patients can share real-time insights and data with one another, to speed up time to insights for children and their families who receive a new cancer diagnosis. To further accelerate AI initiatives for children’s health, Amazon offered $1M in philanthropic support each to CBTN, Nationwide Children’s Hospital and Children’s National Hospital via the $10M Children’s Health Innovation Award (CHIA) program.

The collaborative model for data sharing established by CBTN scaled further with $10M in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Health (ARPA-H) for the RADIANT pediatric data infrastructure on AWS. This expanded platform has shown that real-time, secure sharing of EHR data via Bulk FHIR APIs into AWS HealthLake is possible for children with pediatric cancer. AWS is proud to be a key industry partner for RADIANT and the new model of interoperability and secure data exchange that it’s ushered in for improving research and care.

Future-proofing the pediatric cancer AI workforce

Building the technology infrastructure serves an essential foundation, but only if clinicians and scientists have the skills they need to leverage the data and AI tools to find a cure. To further accelerate these technology skills, Amazon has collaborated with the NIH Kids First program and CBTN to get more researchers, clinicians, and trainees hands-on experience with data in the cloud and AI tools including at the CBTN Summit, where the AWS Skills Center hosted workshops to help upskill the next generation of scientists on AI and the cloud.

Hope on the horizon

For children and families facing cancer diagnoses, finding effective treatment options is critical. By combining AI capabilities and health data interoperability, healthcare providers may be able to identify additional treatment possibilities that could help support patient care. This includes accelerating cancer biomarker discovery through Amazon Bedrock Agents or use of AWS Clean Rooms to enable access to data to multiple researchers without allowing the sharing or copying of the underlying data.

With the resilience of children battling cancer, the ingenuity brought by science’s greatest minds, and today’s EO that can drive meaningful policy changes, future patients and families receiving an unthinkable pediatric cancer diagnosis will soon have more hope and optimism.

Today’s announcement reflects the next step toward combining data and AI to improve children’s health. Amazon is proud to work with patients, their families, clinicians, and scientists to help lead the way.

We encourage you to visit aws.amazon.com/healthcare to learn more about how Amazon can empower pediatric cancer research initiatives.