Amazon Pledges $20M to Support COVID-19 Diagnostics, Research

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has launched the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative, a program with an initial investment of $20 million that will accelerate COVID-19 research and testing.

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The initiative will support customers who are working to bring better and more accurate diagnostic solutions to market faster, and promote collaborations across organizations working on similar issues.

Funding will be provided through a combination of AWS in-kind credits and technical support to assist research teams in leveraging the full potential of the cloud to develop these solutions.

“As COVID-19 continues to spread, we are acutely aware of the impact this is having on families, businesses, and communities. This is a global health emergency that will only be resolved by governments, businesses, academia, and individuals working together to better understand this virus and ultimately find a cure,” Teresa Carlson, vice president for AWS’s worldwide public sector, wrote in a blog post.

“In our AWS business, one area where we have heard an urgent need is in the research and development of diagnostics, which consist of rapid, accurate detection and testing of COVID-19. Better diagnostics will help accelerate treatment and containment, and in time, shorten the course of this epidemic.”

The program will be open to accredited research organizations and private entities that are using AWS to support research-oriented workloads for the development of diagnostics at the point of care. Initially, efforts will focus on solutions for COVID-19, but the initiative will also consider other infectious disease diagnostic projects.

Amazon believes this initial investment, coupled with teams of researchers committed to finding a cure, will help accelerate COVID-19 treatments and testing.

“We believe we can make a difference with the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative program for several reasons. First, accurate detection is the tip of the spear for any effective pandemic response strategy. Second, diagnostics research has historically been underfunded and largely deprioritized in favor of a focus on vaccines,” Carlson wrote.

“Third, organizations working on diagnostics need reliable, scalable compute power, which we can deliver to them along with industry-leading services like analytics and machine learning, so they can process and analyze large data sets and iterate quickly.”

The AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative will benefit from the guidance of an outside technical advisory group made up of leading scientists, global health policy experts, and thought leaders in the area of infectious disease diagnostics.

This advisory group will help set the initiative’s priorities, help participants securely share research findings, and develop better dialogue between customers and qualified external organizations that are working to solve similar challenges.

“The world needs more and more private sector innovation to combat this pandemic,” said Steve Davis, member of the World Health Organization's Digital Health Technical Advisory Group and a member of the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative’s technical advisory group.

“Amazon’s commitments and participation are very welcome, particularly since the lack of significant next-generation diagnostic tools remains a large gap in most health systems. A platform to link research, digital capabilities, and new products to customers globally is an exciting venture.”

The launch of this new initiative coincides with efforts from another tech solution developer. NVIDIA recently announced that it would provide a free 90-day license to Parabricks, NVIDIA’s genome analysis platform, to any researcher around the world who is aiming to combat coronavirus.

“Given the unprecedented spread of the pandemic, getting results in hours versus days could have an extraordinary impact on understanding the virus’s evolution and the development of vaccines,” NVIDIA wrote in a blog post.

“NVIDIA is inviting our family of partners to join us in matching this urgent effort to assist the research community. We’re in discussions with cloud service providers and supercomputing centers to provide compute resources and access to Parabricks on their platforms.”

With its new program, AWS similarly hopes to achieve accelerated solutions for controlling, tracking, and reducing the effects of COVID-19.

Amazon is launching the AWS Diagnostic Development Initiative with participation from 35 global research institutions, startups, and businesses. Individuals interested in learning more can click here.