Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - Omics innovation with AWS HealthOmics: Amgen’s path to faster results (AIM215)

Summary

AWS HealthOmics has been instrumental in advancing bioinformatics analyses for customers in healthcare and life sciences.
AWS focuses on removing the undifferentiated heavy lifting, allowing scientists to concentrate on generating scientific insights.
AWS Health Omics offers cost-effective storage and processing of large amounts of data, with investments in sequence stores, zero ETL transformations for variant and annotation stores, and managed bioinformatics compute workflows.
AWS Health Omics supports a variety of services and features, including CloudFormation, EventBridge, GPUs for workflows, and support for multiple workflow languages like WDL, Nextflow, and CWL.
Itay Erez from Amgen shared how AWS Health Omics has accelerated their bioinformatics analyses, focusing on discovery rather than IT, and highlighted the benefits of scale, stability, cost savings, and ease of use.
Amgen's vision includes broadening accessibility and usage of omics pipelines, integrating with internal systems for automated run parameter generation and start, and migrating more pipelines to AWS Health Omics.
AWS Health Omics is HIPAA eligible, HITRUST certified, GDPR ready, FedRAMP moderate, and ISO certified, ensuring compliance with security and privacy standards.
Future plans for AWS Health Omics include expanding the use of omics storage for cost savings and further integration with platforms for automated data analysis.

AWS HealthOmics is a comprehensive solution for bioinformatics, addressing storage, analytics, and compute needs, which is particularly beneficial for large-scale omics data.
The service's modularity allows customers to use one or all components as needed, providing flexibility in addressing specific workflow requirements.
AWS Health Omics' integration with various workflow languages and tools like NF Core demonstrates its adaptability and commitment to supporting the bioinformatics community's best practices.
Amgen's use case illustrates the practical benefits of AWS Health Omics in a real-world pharmaceutical research setting, emphasizing the importance of cloud computing in accelerating drug discovery and development.
The service's ability to handle diverse bioinformatics pipelines, from sequencing to protein folding, showcases its versatility and potential to support a wide range of scientific research activities.
AWS Health Omics' commitment to security and compliance is critical for customers in the healthcare and life sciences sectors, where data sensitivity and regulatory compliance are paramount.
The focus on customer feedback and continuous improvement suggests that AWS Health Omics will evolve to meet the changing needs of the bioinformatics community, potentially leading to more innovative features and services in the future.