Up-to-date funding from Amazon Web Services, the Children’s Health Innovation Award, or Imagine Grant, will provide $7 million for cloud data resources for pediatric research, overall maternal and child health, and empowerment of pediatric workers and caregivers, according to an announcement made Wednesday at the AWS Summit in Washington, DC
In addition, AWS awarded $1 million each to three children’s hospitals that research and treat childhood cancer and develop tools and applications to improve screening for scarce genetic diseases.
WHY IT IS IMPORTANT
Pediatric medical research is circumscribed by circumscribed resources and sample sizes, as parents who have been diagnosed with a scarce disease in their child can attest. Children with cancer and other scarce diseases often benefit from treatment plans that are adapted from adult treatment protocols.
In particular, identifying genomic aspects of scarce cancers requires sufficient computing power. However, most registered pediatric studies are compact, single-center, and unfunded, slowing progress in developing more effective treatments, according to AWS.
Access to cloud services such as secure data repositories that manage de-identified and anonymized data, as well as artificial intelligence engines, can aid move the needle, AWS explained in its article statement on your website.
By providing nonprofit institutions with data-driven knowledge, researchers can better understand the genetic makeup of diseases, and doctors can improve patient outcomes and experiences with more personalized therapies, the cloud giant says.
The $10 million initiative will support a consortium of hospitals and other institutions using cloud computing and artificial intelligence resources to accelerate research and discovery. AWS has provided $7 million to organizations for projects that accelerate pediatric research, improve overall maternal and child health, or empower pediatric staff and caregivers.
The $3 million in Imagine grant funding from AWS will be distributed to three organizations: Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.; Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio; and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network based at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
Nationwide processes anonymized genomic data about children with cancer, the NCI Childhood Cancer Database, as part of a immense study of children with cancer across the United States that is accessed by researchers across the country – in near real time, AWS said.
“What we really want to do is make rare cancers less rare by making this comprehensive information available to those who really want to research for a variety of discovery-driven goals,” Elaine Mardis, co-executive director of the Steve and Cindy Rasmussen Institute for Genomic Medicine at the Institute Abigail Wexner Research Fellow at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the statement said.
“What drives discovery, at its most immediate level, is enabled by the cloud.”
Using artificial intelligence, Children’s National Hospital is screening children for scarce genetic conditions by assessing facial features with smartphone cameras to identify subtle changes in those features soon after birth. Researchers are testing the app on patients in 30 countries to aid screen children who may not have access to a geneticist nearby, AWS reported.
BIGGER TREND
According to Black Book Research, by 2018, 93% of hospital CIOs were actively recruiting to develop a next-generation, HIPAA-compliant cloud infrastructure.
Technology could better serve pediatric care, according to Dr. William Hay Jr., chief medical officer at Astarte Medical, a precision medicine company.
“People too often assume that children are little adults with little problems,” he said in October.
“Childhood health disorders are just as complex as adult diseases, and many, probably most, of them put the child at risk—programme him or her—for complications later in life.”
Children with convoluted health conditions make up less than 1% of all children in the U.S., but they contribute to this one third of all children’s health care costs. Their disorders require “extensive assessments, collection and analysis of extraordinary amounts of data” to be used to prevent adverse health outcomes, Hay explained.
ON RECORD
“We are extremely excited about the AWS initiative because it fits perfectly into our narrative that, although childhood cancer is a rare disease, it represents a unique testing ground for new technologies because of its dependence on real-time discovery and collaborative networks,” Adam Resnick, director of the Center for Data-Driven Biomedical Discovery at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said in an AWS statement.