Maze Therapeutics Applies Genetics Insights to Accelerate Drug Discovery Using AWS

Why do some people get sick while others don’t, even when they have the same disease-causing mutation? Researchers have found that certain genetic interactions have a protective effect on certain diseases, which can be discovered and identified using functional genomics data. However, data scientists regularly spend a disproportionate amount of time cleaning and preparing datasets rather than performing the analyses that yield the most meaningful insights. To address this challenge, San Francisco-based biotech company Maze Therapeutics built its proprietary COMPASS data analysis platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deliver precision medicines based on genetic insights into metabolic, cardiovascular, and renal diseases, as well as neurological and ophthalmic disorders.

The data analysis platform, COMPASS, combines human genetics data from both open and proprietary sources with functional genomics tools and data science technology to identify pharmacologically relevant gene-disease associations, determine mechanistic bases, and accelerate precision drug development. The company launched its streamlined life science data analysis platform using Biotech Blueprint on AWS, a reference architecture for scientific applications that serves biotechnology companies managing software on the cloud.

“Biotech Blueprint allowed us to begin work almost immediately, rapidly deploying network and data architecture in days rather than months while ensuring that our analysis environment followed current best practices,” said Nolan Nichols, PhD, senior software engineer for Maze Therapeutics.

Using AWS Transit Gateway, which connects VPCs and on-premises networks through a central hub, Maze Therapeutics simplified network configuration and maintenance for the COMPASS platform while enabling the creation of personalized access accounts and tailored analysis environments for individual data scientists. This multi-account structure provides increased security while giving analysts access to catalogs of high-quality data pooled from multiple sources. Experts can directly query data using Amazon Athena, a serverless interactive query service. “Questions that took hours or days to answer using public APIs now take seconds or minutes using Amazon Athena,” said Nolan. Maze Therapeutics is leveraging these and other AWS tools within the COMPASS platform to build a pipeline of drug candidates that impact the most relevant genetic targets with the greatest likelihood of clinical benefit.

Find out how AWS is helping other healthcare companies realize the potential of precision medicine.