April 20, 2021 - Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced that it will distribute $12 million to fight COVID-19 through cloud-powered diagnostics research and development. 

Starting in mid-April, AWS will expand its focus to early disease detection to identify outbreaks at the individual and community level. The company will also focus on prognosis to better understand disease trajectory, as well as public health genomics to boost viral genome sequencing globally.

Although AWS will prioritize COVID-19 projects, it will focus on other infectious diseases as well. 

“We have seen transformative innovations in how we diagnose disease over the past year, from machine learning-powered X-ray imagery analysis to new developments in rapid, high quality, and direct-to-consumer tests,” Vin Gupta, MD chief medical officer of Amazon’s COVID-19 response, said in the announcement.

“We have already seen inspirational results from the Diagnostic Development Initiative, and we look forward to supporting broader uses of cloud technologies to enable organizations and communities to identify and respond even faster to future outbreaks,” Gupta continued. 

So far, AWS has committed $20 million in computing credits and customized expertise from the AWS professional services team to support customers using its drive diagnostic innovations.

The initiative helped 87 organizations in 17 countries, from nonprofits and research institutions to startups and large businesses. 

An additional $8 million supported a range of diagnostic projects, such as molecular COVID-19 diagnostics tests for antibodies, antigens, and nucleic acids, as well as diagnostic imaging, wearables, and data analytic tools that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect COVID-19. 

The AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative has accelerated projects that have a direct impact on COVID-19 detection and is helping to change what’s possible with medical diagnostics. 

The AWS-funded projects are not only helping to support the medical community, but the overall work in infectious diseases as well. 

One of the projects is a smartwatch app developed by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine’s healthcare innovation lab. 

The watch is designed to flag signs of a person’s immune system fighting potential COVID-19 infection. The app is powered by algorithm that detects any changes in an individual’s resting heart rate and step count. 

So far, results have been promising. A pilot trial alerted newly infected individuals nearly 10 days before they became aware of any symptoms. Currently, the app is in the next phase of the study. 

The Stanford team is looking to enroll about 10 million participants. 

In the second project, Illumina is accelerating the identification of viral mutations through next-generation sequencing.

The viral genome of SARS-CoV-2 was first sequenced on Illumina’s technology in China and made public in mid-January. The company then released its SARS-CoV-2 data toolkit three months later.

The toolkit runs on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and is built to analyze COVID-19 samples.

So far, Illumina has helped more than 800 users process viral sequencing samples across its different apps. 

The third project focuses on expanding access to high-sensitivity molecular COVID-19 testing for health systems, employers, governments, and other organizations across the US.

The Helix COVID-19 test received FDA emergency use authorization and the company intends to process up to 100,000 tests per day in the US. This makes Helix one of the largest coronavirus testing laboratories in the US. 

And in the last AWS-funded project, Centro Diagnostics Italiano and Bracco Imaging created an open-source imaging archive project. 

The AlforCOVID Imaging Archive is a repository with nearly 1,000 chest X-rays and anonymized clinical data of COVID-19 patients. Images and clinical data are analyzed using machine learning approaches and performed on AWS.