Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) has announced that GRAIL, Inc., a life sciences company whose mission is to detect cancer early, when it can be cured, has selected AWS as its cloud infrastructure provider. With more than a billion dollars in funding and advised by a world-class set of industry and cancer experts, GRAIL is combining high-intensity genomic sequencing with the techniques of modern data science as it seeks to transform the way cancer is diagnosed. GRAIL is running one of the largest clinical research programs ever pursued in genomic medicine, and AWS will enable GRAIL to ingest hundreds of thousands of records and genomic datasets, securely and reliably store them, and choose from a wide range of analytics and machine learning services to develop early detection products and demonstrate their clinical utility.
GRAIL is collaborating with leading community and academic medical centers to conduct its studies, which will create unprecedented amounts of data as each patient record can contain as much as a terabyte. By migrating its core processing and analytical infrastructure from on-premises to AWS, GRAIL is leveraging AWS’s unmatched breadth and depth of cloud functionality, HIPAA-compliant services, and proven security to build a data science pipeline that will allow GRAIL and its clinical partners to process and analyze large-scale datasets.
“In today’s complex and competitive global healthcare marketplace, technology is a cornerstone in our effort to develop solutions that detect cancer at its earliest stages,” said Ken Drazan, chief business officer at GRAIL. “AWS’s cloud platform provides critical infrastructure as we scale our databases and computational tools to support our large population-scale clinical studies and the development of our early detection products.”
“Customers across industries are using AWS’s comprehensive set of storage, analytics, and machine learning services to power massive-scale data analytics initiatives,” said Mike Clayville, vice president, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “GRAIL is undertaking one of the largest, and most complex, data science initiatives ever conceived. Running on the world’s most widely adopted cloud platform will allow GRAIL to produce and analyze datasets of unprecedented scale, securely collaborate with research and clinical partners, and focus on developing the deepest and most comprehensive understanding of cancer biology to reduce global cancer mortality.”
GRAIL joins a growing list of life sciences and genomics customers and partners running their cloud infrastructures on AWS, including Novartis, Merck, AstraZeneca, GE, Cerner, Phillips, and Bristol Meyers Squibb, along with academic institutions such as NYU, Baylor and Harvard.
