Roche Partners with AWS to Unlock the Full Potential of Health Big Data for Personalized Healthcare

BEIJING, Dec. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AWS announced that Roche Group, one of the largest healthcare companies globally, is migrating the majority of its cloud workloads to AWS to better leverage the value of health big data. Roche utilizes AWS's capabilities in high-performance computing, analytics, machine learning, databases, storage, and security to accelerate drug discovery and conduct large-scale processing of health big data to deliver high-quality, personalized care services. Roche is also collaborating with AWS Professional Services to integrate its IT systems, ensuring compliance with regulations, protecting patient privacy, and securely sharing data on-demand within the company as well as with key external partners such as academic institutions, regulatory agencies, and healthcare service providers.

AWS's security infrastructure and service portfolio will support Roche's personalized healthcare initiatives. Although biopharmaceutical companies have been engaged in personalized medicine for over two decades, it is only recently that advancements in data, analytics, and digital technologies have provided the healthcare industry with an opportunity for transformation. By leveraging AWS's data analytics and database services, such as Amazon OpenSearch Service (AWS's service for searching, visualizing, and analyzing up to petabytes of text and unstructured data) and Amazon Aurora (AWS’s cloud-native MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database), Roche gains actionable insights from enterprise, research, clinical, digital health, and real-world patient data. Using AWS, Roche can examine health data at scale related to patients' genetic makeup, overall health conditions, and drug efficacy and side effects, while analyzing anonymized structured patient datasets to protect patient privacy. This capability provides Roche researchers with a more detailed understanding of patient biology across larger patient populations and helps them identify patterns and outliers to inform advancements in diagnostics and treatment.

CFO and CIO of Roche GroupAlan HippePh.D.Said: "With the tremendous advances in data, analytics, and digital technologies, we are transforming the way drugs are discovered and developed, as well as how care is delivered to patients. AWS provides us with high-performance and secure cloud solutions that help harness the power of data to improve patients' lives. By collaborating with AWS, we are integrating health data in new ways to detect, diagnose, treat, monitor, and manage diseases more effectively and efficiently, ultimately benefiting patients. Roche complies with all relevant data privacy laws, including but not limited to the Swiss Data Protection Act, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the U.S. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), as well as China's Cybersecurity Law and related data privacy standards."

AWS Supports Roche in Utilizing Digital Technologies Such as Smartphone Applications, Which Can Assist Healthcare Professionals in Providing Personalized Care and Enable Patients to Manage Their Own Health. AWS Services Like Amazon Lambda (a Serverless, Event-Driven Computing Service), Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS), and Amazon SageMaker (an AWS Service That Helps Developers and Data Scientists Quickly Build, Train, and Deploy Machine Learning Models) Allow Roche to Extract, Store, Process, and Rapidly Analyze Health Data Collected by Smart Devices. For Example, Roche Built and Runs the mySugr Application on AWS to Securely Aggregate and Analyze Data Such as Blood Glucose Levels of Diabetes Patients. Roche Uses the Application to Automatically Extract and Analyze Data from Smart Meters to Better Inform Patients' Schedules and Medication Dosages. Across Its Range of Digital Healthcare Applications, Roche Continuously and Securely Collects and Analyzes Patient Health Data in the Cloud, Allowing Patients and Their Healthcare Providers to Gain More Timely and Accurate Insights Into Disease Progression and Treatment Options.

Roche also utilizes AWS's scalable high-performance computing capabilities, as well as container and analytics services such as Amazon Redshift (AWS’s cloud data warehouse service), to securely extract and process insights from tens of petabytes of genomic data obtained from more than 300,000 cancer patients worldwide who have consented to participate in research, while maintaining patient privacy. Roche uses Amazon FSx for Lustre (a cost-effective, high-performance, scalable storage service for compute workloads) to store this genomic data and make it quickly available for analysis. With the support of AWS, Roche is continuing to expand its cancer knowledge base, enabling faster identification of cases in the future.

Roche Leverages Integrated Electronic Health Records Processed on AWS to Gain Health Insights and Enhance the Value of Its Oncology Analytics. Roche runs analytics, machine learning, storage, and managed database applications on AWS, extracting high-quality data from more than 3 million electronic health records and standardizing it to generate anonymized real-world patient datasets, including petabyte-scale oncology data and other protected health information. Roche researchers use this information to guide their work and inform the design of clinical trials.

Vice President of Business Development and Industry at AWSKathrin RenzSaid: "With AWS supporting its R&D and healthcare operations, Roche can provide timely and relevant data to help scientists collaborate more safely and effectively. It also assists researchers in designing more efficient clinical trials, enables caregivers to make more accurate decisions, and empowers patients to better manage their own health conditions. AWS is helping the healthcare and life sciences industries cross the threshold into personalized medicine, reducing the time and cost of clinical trials, and improving patient health through digital healthcare. With AWS, Roche is transforming complex health data into a resource rather than an obstacle, and shortening the time required to deliver new drugs into the hands of patients."