Third Rock Ventures Accelerates Biotech Research for Startups Using Turnkey Architecture Built on AWS

Founded in 2007, TRV pushes the boundaries of science and technology to impact patient outcomes with its portfolio of 62 life sciences companies predominantly built from the ground up. The organization incubates ideas for companies internally, provides funding, and launches on average three companies per year with the necessary technical and human resources. “We needed a readily deployable cloud architecture that we could repurpose each time we launched a company,” says Adam Tebbe, vice president of platform operations at TRV. “We don’t want to manually build the infrastructure or reinvent the wheel every time. We needed something ready to deploy in a day, repeatably, reproducibly, and with high quality, following best practices.”

In 2016, the company worked alongside AWS to develop the first iteration of its Biotech Blueprint, a reference architecture for biotechnology companies that want to manage their scientific applications in the cloud. “Selecting AWS was a natural choice,” says John Keilty, a venture partner at TRV. “What was unusual about AWS compared to other cloud vendors was the level to which they leaned in, providing resources and guidance and a ton of upside for our companies.”

Over the years, TRV and AWS have worked to rearchitect the Biotech Blueprint to reflect changes in technology, remove rigidity, and help startups react more nimbly to advances in science. For example, the second generation of the Biotech Blueprint changed from a single-account model to a multiaccount foundation using AWS Organizations, which lets a company centrally govern its environment as it grows and scales its workloads on AWS. “AWS is constantly rolling out new services and new features,” Tebbe says. “They are always working to help us modernize and incorporate the latest offerings.”

In 2022, TRV began work on a third generation of the Biotech Blueprint, called the Simple Cloud Accelerator. TRV joined forces with Tennex, an AWS Partner that has facilitated more than 50 launches in the cloud for biotech companies, with a strategic focus on life sciences startups. TRV and Tennex created a modular foundational infrastructure with greater flexibility and built-in controls, geared more toward facilitating secure, well-governed scale and accelerating research and development. AWS provided domain knowledge and expertise, helping TRV to follow best practices. “Different pressures and parameters fuel the growth of companies who do different types of science,” says Tebbe. “Our objective was to give them the foundation to grow and scale.”

At its core, the Simple Cloud Accelerator helps companies set up to operate in the cloud quickly and securely, providing the building blocks for scientific workloads while taking care of underlying networking and security. “With the Simple Cloud Accelerator, new companies take just minutes to get accounts set up and running,” says Tebbe. “They start operating in a secure, vetted environment.”

Tennex simplified the code base for account deployment using AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK), which defines cloud application resources using familiar programming languages like Typescript. “The Simple Cloud Accelerator is fully baked multiaccount infrastructure in a box,” says Jack O’Brien, cofounder of Tennex. “Companies gain a massive uptick in productivity. They don’t have to worry about their cloud operations and can feel confident they’re consistently aligned with best practices. The whole goal is to help scientists to do science and, ultimately, to help these companies grow."

The Simple Cloud Accelerator uses other core AWS services to ingrain best practices in monitoring and security. For anomaly detection, the Simple Cloud Accelerator uses Amazon GuardDuty, a threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for malicious activity and delivers detailed security findings for visibility and remediation. Amazon GuardDuty automatically consumes management events from AWS CloudTrail, which monitors and records account activity across the AWS infrastructure. Additionally, the Simple Cloud Accelerator uses Amazon CloudWatch, which collects and visualizes near-real-time logs, metrics, and event data in automated dashboards. “If you were to try to do some of these things manually, you could be poking around for days, assuming you knew what you were doing to begin with,” says Tebbe. “Using the Simple Cloud Accelerator on AWS, new companies start operating right away. And they don’t just operate—they operate effectively and securely in an environment that we’ve vetted and thought through very well.”

In March 2023, TRV launched Rapport Therapeutics (Rapport), a neuroscience startup that was the first company to use the Simple Cloud Accelerator. Like many of TRV’s portfolio companies, Rapport enrolled in AWS Activate, which provides free tools, resources, content, and expert support to accelerate startups at every stage. “Without AWS, it’s unlikely that the infrastructure we build would be as robust or simple to manage at this point in our company’s life cycle,” says Karina Chmielewski, chief information officer at Rapport and former vice president of platform operations at TRV. “It takes a lot of effort and expertise—which a small startup typically doesn’t have. The Simple Cloud Accelerator on AWS helps a brand-new biotech company to build a robust cloud environment quickly, facilitate research and collaborations, and secure business operations. Our cloud footprint will scale as we continue to grow our clinical and research operations.”

After additional testing from Rapport and other companies, TRV intends to release the Simple Cloud Accelerator into the public domain, as it did for earlier iterations of the code, to benefit the commercial and research communities. “We’ve found an architecture that works, and we want to share it,” says Adam Perry, cofounder of Tennex and lead architect on the project. “We want to help companies accelerate their meaningful work. Over the years, past iterations of this blueprint have become the standard for how to launch a biotech company on AWS. We’re thrilled to contribute to the next version and help a new generation of life sciences startups grow.”

TRV and Tennex hope that the modular structure of the code base will drive further innovation in computational biology and related sciences. “The adoption has grown beyond anyone’s expectations,” says Chmielewski. “TRV, AWS, and Tennex are setting these trends and paying it forward to the industry.”