Publications
Partners
New York - Amazon.com is in a race against Google to store data on human DNA, seeking both bragging rights in helping scientists make new medical discoveries and market share in a business that may be worth $1bn a year by 2018.
Academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings - Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services - spurring the two to one-up each other as they win high-profile genomics business, according to interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts.
That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalised medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient's DNA profile. Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.
Already, universities and drug manufacturers are embarking on projects to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people. The human genome is the full complement of DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which is found in nearly every cell of the body.
Clients view Google and Amazon as doing a better job storing genomics data than they can do using their own computers, keeping it secure, controlling costs and allowing it to be easily shared.
Business growth
The cloud companies are going beyond storage to offer analytical functions that let scientists make sense of DNA data. Microsoft and International Business Machines are also competing for a slice of the market. The "cloud" refers to data or software that physically resides in a server and is accessible via the internet, which allows users to access it without downloading it to their own computer.
Now an estimated $100m to $300m business globally, the cloud genomics market is expected to grow to $1bn by 2018, said research analyst Daniel Ives of investment bank FBR Capital. By that time, the entire cloud market should have $50bn to $75bn in annual revenue, up from about $30bn now.
"The cloud is the entire future of this field," Craig Venter, who led a private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, said in an interview. His new company, San Diego-based Human Longevity, recently tried to import genomic data from servers at the J Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland.
The transmission was so slow, scientists had to resort to sending disks and thumb drives by FedEx and human messengers, or "sneakernet", he said. The company now uses Amazon Web Services.
Raw DNA data is uploaded to Amazon's cloud, where software from privately-held DNAnexus assembles the millions of chunks into the full, three billion-letter long genome.
DNAnexus's algorithms then determine where an individual genome differs from the "reference" human genome, the company's chief scientist Dr David Shaywitz said, in hopes of identifying new drug targets.
Showing how important Google and Amazon view this business, and how they hope to use existing customers to lure future ones, each is hosting well-known genomics datasets for free.
Neither company discloses the amount of genomics data it holds, but based on interviews with analysts and genomic scientists, as well as the companies' own announcements of what customers they've won, Amazon Web Services may be bigger.
