[New Wave] Cloud is Recreating the Healthcare Industry

At the end of 2019, I attended a presentation by a then unfamiliar bio startup called ‘Moderna’ at AWS re:Invent, a global cloud technology conference held in Las Vegas, USA. Moderna was developing a customized Zika virus vaccine by using the cloud to deliver messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) to target cells, artificially expressing the desired protein. Unlike traditional drug development methods, it was astonishing that a process that used to take years could be completed within a year through a digital process utilizing cloud artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics services.

A few months later, the world experienced a pandemic caused by the coronavirus. By a narrow margin, Moderna earned the title of the fastest vaccine developer in history. Many people were skeptical about completing vaccine development, which used to take nearly a decade, within a year. However, before COVID-19, the pharmaceutical and bio industries had anticipated that cloud and AI would present new methods for vaccine and drug development. Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon, explained at last year’s CERAWeeK conference, “Moderna was able to predict the structure of the vaccine and run various simulations using machine learning,” adding, “Thanks to the cloud, there was no need for hardware or data centers. Amazon’s computing, storage, and data warehousing allowed them to rapidly scale their machine learning capabilities.”

AstraZeneca, which developed a different type of COVID-19 vaccine, also utilizes petabytes of genome sequencing data based on the cloud to leverage drug research and development information. Noy Petrovsky, Vice President of AstraZeneca Genome Research Center, stated, “We can run over 51 billion statistical tests within 24 hours and study the effects of each mutation or individual gene on various phenotypes,” adding, “Through this, we conducted more than 40 drug discovery projects last year.”

Marcello Damiani, Moderna’s Chief Digital Officer, said, “Traditional pharmaceutical companies have massive IT organizations to maintain physical computing capacity and backup and disaster recovery solutions. However, by leveraging the cloud, there is no need to worry about computing capacity, and backup and recovery become simple, enabling savings of millions of dollars in data center costs and achieving rapid new drug development.”

These cases demonstrate how the cloud is reinventing collaboration methods in healthcare and life sciences during the pandemic, enabling fast and accurate clinical and operational decisions based on data, and reducing treatment costs. On this foundation, customized healthcare cloud solutions are also being introduced. For example, Amazon HealthLake is a service that securely stores, transforms, and analyzes healthcare data within minutes.

The healthcare and life sciences sectors have traditionally been conservative and resistant to innovation. The pandemic has introduced new competitors armed with digital technologies into the market. Until now, only a few large corporations could develop, manufacture, and sell new drugs, but going forward, healthcare startups equipped with cloud and AI will continuously emerge. This is expected to be a great opportunity for our country as well. Now is the time to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Seokchan Yoon, AWS Senior Tech Evangelist