Global life sciences company with a mission to detect cancer early
taps the cloud with the most functionality to power breakthroughs
SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul. 31, 2017--
Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ:
AMZN), 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.
About Amazon Web Services
For 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most
comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 90
fully featured services for compute, storage, networking, database,
analytics, application services, deployment, management, developer,
mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI),
security, hybrid, and enterprise applications, from 43 Availability
Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil,
Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the
UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the
world -- including the fastest growing startups, largest enterprises,
and leading government agencies -- to power their infrastructure, make
them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.
About Amazon
Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than
competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational
excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping,
personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle
Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa
are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more
information, visit www.amazon.com/about
and follow @AmazonNews.
About GRAIL
GRAIL is a life sciences company whose mission is to detect cancer early
when it can be cured. GRAIL is using the power of high-intensity
sequencing, population-scale clinical trials, and state of the art
Computer Science and Data Science to enhance the scientific
understanding of cancer biology and develop blood tests for early-stage
cancer detection. The company’s funding was led by ARCH Venture Partners
and includes Amazon, Bezos Expeditions, Bill Gates, Bristol-Myers
Squibb, Celgene, Decheng Capital, GV, Illumina, Johnson & Johnson
Innovation, Merck, McKesson Ventures, Sutter Hill Ventures, Tencent,
Varian Medical Systems, and other financial partners. For more
information, please visit www.grail.com.

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Source: Amazon.com, Inc.
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