Nationwide Children’s Hospital Uses AWS Technology for Processing and Securing Clinical Genomics Data

Nationwide Children’s Hospital (Nationwide Children’s) faces the challenge of processing compute-intensive clinical genomics data securely and at scale to diagnose and treat patients as it also works toward a greater understanding of human genomics. Nationwide Children’s uses Amazon Web Services (AWS) tools for processing and security.

At the most basic level, genomics is the programming language of life, but understanding human genomes and determining genomic variants in specific clinical cases are immensely complicated tasks. In 2016, Nationwide Children’s set out to expand not only genomics research but also clinical genomics. “In a clinical situation, we do thousands of clinical exomes and panels every year,” says Grant Lammi, cloud development manager at The Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine, which is part of Nationwide Children’s. Genetic sequencing at such a scale requires enormous computing power, and HIPAA concerns make security a top priority. In response, Nationwide Children’s developed a set of largely serverless bioinformatics tools to securely move clinical genomics from preparing DNA for sequencing to analyzing DNA sequence data and beyond.

Nationwide Children’s looked to AWS for the massive compute power and storage space it needs to conduct clinical genomics. Nationwide Children’s data pipeline, developed internally and hosted in the cloud, has practically limitless scale, which means it can quickly analyze sequence data and reduce the time it takes to get results to patients. Because security is a key challenge when dealing with clinical genomics data, Nationwide Children’s also turned to AWS for tools to build security into its cloud applications. “We don’t want to have to worry about patching servers and following exploits and that kind of thing,” says Lammi. “That’s all off-loaded onto the AWS teams. That frees us up to do science, which is what we want to do.”