Children's Hospital of Philadelphia is using Amazon Omics, a tool designed to help researchers study omic data powered by Amazon Web Services, to analyze the sequences of DNA, RNA and proteins, CNBC reported Dec. 28.
According to AWS Chief Medical Officer Taha Kass-Hout, MD, since the vast majority of healthcare and genetic data is unstructured, 97 percent of it goes totally unused.
Amazon Omics aims to make it easier for researchers to use this data by helping them store the raw data, helping run workflows that process the data and simplifying the output of sequence processing.
For the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, using Amazon Omics has allowed them to research genetics without having to store massive amounts of data.
"We're a big pediatric academic medical center, but we're still not big enough to learn and build everything that is required to make productive use of omic data," Children's Hospital Chief Research Informatics Officer Jeffrey Pennington told CNBC. "Our time and energy, our effort, our financial wherewithal is much better spent putting the puzzle together rather than generating those pieces in the first place."