Genomics in the Cloud

Genomics organizations can struggle with tracking the origins of data when performing secondary analyses and running reproducible and scalable workflows while minimizing IT overhead. AWS offers services for scalable, cost-effective data analysis and simplified orchestration for running and automating parallelizable workflows. Options for automating workflows enable reproducible research or clinical applications, while AWS native, partner (NVIDIA and DRAGEN), and open source solutions (Cromwell and Nextflow) provide flexible options for workflow orchestrators to help scale data analysis. See related solutions »

Successful genomics research and interpretation often depend on multiple, diverse, multi-modal datasets from large populations. AWS enables organizations to harmonize multi-omic datasets and govern robust data access controls and permissions across a global infrastructure to maintain data integrity as research involves more collaborators and stakeholders. AWS simplifies the ability to store, query, and analyze genomics data, and link with clinical information. See related solutions » 

Analysis requires integrated multi-modal datasets and knowledge bases, intensive computational power, big data analytics, and machine learning at scale, which, historically can take weeks or months, delaying time to insights. AWS accelerates analysis of big genomics data by leveraging machine learning and high-performance computing. With AWS, researchers have access to greater computing efficiencies at scale, reproducible data processing, data integration capabilities to pull in multi-modal datasets, and public data for clinical annotation—all within a compliance-ready environment. See related solutions » 

There are several hinderances that impede scale and adoption of genomics for clinical applications including speed of analysis, managing protected health information (PHI), and providing reproducible and interpretable results. By leveraging the capabilities of the AWS Cloud, organizations can establish a differentiated capability in genomics to advance their applications in precision medicine and patient practice. AWS services enable the use of genomics in the clinic by providing the data capture, compute, and storage capabilities needed to empower the modernized clinical lab to decrease the time to results, all while adhering to the most stringent patient privacy regulations. See related solutions »

As more life science researchers move to the cloud and develop cloud-native workflows, they bring reference datasets with them, often in their own personal buckets, leading to duplication, silos, and poor version documentation of commonly used datasets. The AWS Open Data Program (ODP) helps democratize data access by making it readily available in Amazon S3, providing the research community with a single documented source of truth. This increases study reproducibility, stimulates community collaboration, and reduces data duplication. The ODP also covers the cost of Amazon S3 storage, egress, and cross-region transfer for accepted datasets.

Researchers utilize massive genomics datasets that require large-scale storage options and powerful computational processing, which can be cost prohibitive. AWS presents cost-saving opportunities for genomics researchers across the data lifecycle—from storage to interpretation. AWS infrastructure and data services enable organizations to save time, money, and devote more resources to science.