AWS commits $10M to support new Cancer AI Alliance with the Fred Hutch Cancer Center

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is proud to be a healthcare and technology partner for the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA), a new initiative announced today. The CAIA is a consortium of four National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer centers including Fred Hutch Cancer Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins, and leading technology and service companies. AWS is contributing a total of $10 million towards the more than $40 million in funding that helps establish the CAIA.

“The CAIA will help deliver on its critical mission of transforming cancer research and care. Together, we will accelerate innovation in cancer discovery and treatments, deploy generative artificial intelligence at scale, and leverage the power, agility, and security of cloud computing to revolutionize health and patient outcomes,” said Dave Levy, AWS Vice President of Worldwide Public Sector.

The CAIA will look to apply the latest advancements in AI, GPUs, and cloud technology, to securely federate across patient health datasets throughout the members of the Alliance. Members will unlock insights and revolutionize cancer research and care while respecting the fundamental rights of patients and research participants. Fred Hutch Cancer Center will spearhead the effort and serve as the designated coordinating center for the Alliance.

AI and machine learning (ML) approaches, including advancements in generative AI, are revolutionizing the healthcare space and the field of oncology research. Any big data science, especially oncology with large amounts of often unstructured data, faces challenges around data extraction, harmonization, and integration. However, this is a space where large language models (LLMs) powered by generative AI, and other traditional AI/ML approaches often shine, finding interconnections amongst unstructured data. While there will always be the need for a human in the loop, AI/ML approaches enable the data to be presented in queryable formats to allow researchers and healthcare practitioners to ask complex questions that reveal novel insights. This often requires vast amounts of secure storage, specialized compute, and built-for-purpose solutions to realize the promise. The CAIA will establish common technical standards and incentivize cancer centers with funding to bring together data in such a way that researchers can unlock new insights while protecting patient privacy.

The Alliance plans to build a federated AI/ML framework and will have access to AWS purpose-built healthcare technologies and services such as AWS Clean Rooms, AWS HealthLake, AWS HealthOmics, and AWS HealthImaging. This approach will allow each individual cancer center to create a secure data clean room in minutes and collaborate with any other organization on AWS to generate unique insights without the data leaving their environments. The coordinating center at Fred Hutch, in partnership with AWS and other members, will also build a solution that provides essential compute resources (including GPUs) to process the high volumes of healthcare data, including health records, pathology, genomics, medical images and other modalities.

The CAIA marks an important step towards our understanding of cancer and improving patient outcomes using the power of data and AI. It launches with four founding members and aims to grow in 2025 and beyond. The Alliance will recruit additional cancer centers to join the initiative, with a view to democratizing cancer research and raising the numbers needed to address the data challenge.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cancer is a leading cause of death, accounting for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020, or nearly one in six deaths worldwide. Decades of research have identified that while there is a genetic component to the advent of the disease, cancer is multi-factorial and driven through interaction with the environment, exposure to carcinogenic agents like radiation, UV, or chemicals, and even biological. Cancer is extremely hard to treat not only because its natural biological processes run amok, but also because research has shown that cancer varies between individuals, even when originating in the same tissue. This heterogenous nature of the disease makes cancer treatment a big data problem, often challenging researchers and healthcare professionals with questions around limited access to relevant data and compute.

“AWS has a long history of supporting critical cancer research and patient healthcare in the US and globally, and the CAIA continues this commitment,” said Levy. “Our Healthcare and Life Sciences team is dedicated to improving healthcare outcomes, and especially oncology around the world.”

Following are some other AWS initiatives that support critical cancer research and patient healthcare across the world:

• In 2022, the Biden administration announced the Cancer Moonshot 2.0, with a goal of reducing the cancer death rate in the US by at least half by 2047, and also improving the experience of patients, family members, and others touched by the illness. AWS has committed to supporting the effort, exemplified by our work with the Children’s Brain Tumor Network (CBTN), Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), and 33 other member institutions and hospitals with their mission of connecting researchers and harmonizing data from around the globe.
• New York University (NYU) Langone Medical Center is collaborating with AWS, NVIDIA, and Medical Open Network for Artificial Intelligence (MONAI), to develop an open science approach to help patients with metastatic cancer. With AWS’s commitment to democratizing access to important data, NYUMets — the world’s largest metastatic brain cancer dataset — is now available in the Registry of Open Data on AWS at no cost to researchers everywhere.
• Doctors and researchers at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, in agreement with NCI and the Children’s Oncology Group, are leveraging AWS services to perform molecular characterization of pediatric cancer with a view to improving lives of all children living with cancer in the US.
• In the UK, AWS is supporting the Cancer 2.0 initiative with Genomics England and the National Health Service (NHS) UK. The initiative aims to shorten the time it takes to receive accurate diagnostic results for more than 300,000 people diagnosed with cancer in the UK and uses the power of multi-modal data to deliver personalized treatments.
• In Germany, Munich Leukemia Lab (MLL), a leading voice in the field of leukemia diagnostics, treatment, and research, is working with AWS to use the power of AI/ML to automate leukemia diagnosis, reducing the time to diagnosis and improving diagnosis accuracy, thereby reducing the burden on technicians and oncologists.