Cambia scales Lens.org on Amazon RDS to link over 458M innovation records globally

As Lens.org expanded to integrate scholarly works and biological sequences, Cambia identified an opportunity to broaden its global impact. The organization set out to link knowledge across patents, research and genetic data.

To fulfill its mission of democratizing access to information and tools for discovery, analytics, and decision-making, Cambia required infrastructure that could scale to handle up to 300 terabytes of data. It also needed to support advanced analytics that reveal citation patterns, highlight research trends, and map technology landscapes. These capabilities would help researchers, policymakers, and innovators uncover relationships across knowledge silos and enable evidence-based decisions.

Cambia operated with a small engineering team that sought to reduce time spent maintaining infrastructure while continuing to develop new features and innovate at speed. To support this growth, the organization moved to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) to scale resources beyond university-hosted systems.

On AWS, Cambia now supports its growing dataset of innovation records with 99.99 percent high availability for users worldwide. The organization can scale resources in minutes to meet demand, down from hours or even days. This flexibility has reduced operational costs by 30 percent, as well as freed Cambia’s team of four backend engineers to focus on building new tools that improve knowledge sharing and accelerate innovation.

Cambia relies on Amazon RDS to deliver consistent availability for complex queries across millions of interconnected records. With automated backups and maintenance, Amazon RDS helps Lens.org scale without interruption. It also provides the foundation for advanced analytics that uncover relationships across patents, scholarly works, and genetic data.

For large-scale storage, Cambia uses Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), an object storage service. Amazon S3 provides durable, cost-effective storage for patents, scholarly publications, and genetic data, making this information reliably accessible to a global audience.

To sustain large-scale data processing, the organization runs workloads on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a fully managed service that provides secure, resizable compute capacity in the cloud. EC2 instances power complex analytical tasks. Cambia also deploys Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), a container orchestration service, to manage fluctuating workloads cost-effectively. With this combination, the organization now scales services automatically during peak demand and pays only for the compute resources it uses, helping to lower operational costs—critical for nonprofit social enterprises.

"AWS helps us keep focused on what matters. For us, that means uncovering relationships across patents, research, and genetic data so people everywhere can solve problems and make better decisions," said Richard Jefferson, CEO, Cambia.

Cambia is exploring artificial intelligence (AI) to add new capabilities. The organization aims to implement Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service for building generative AI applications. Planned features include automated document summaries and intelligent query assistance. These capabilities will help users navigate the platform's vast knowledge repository more efficiently.

Cambia also aims to develop what it calls its "innovation cartography" vision. This includes dynamic reporting tools that automatically update as new patents and scholarly works are published. With these tools, users can map relationships across science, technology, and society, and track emerging innovation trends in real time.