Accelerating Collaborative Omics Research with EPAM’s HealthOmics Platform on AWS

Life sciences and healthcare have always been crucial fields, as they directly impact our well-being. A groundbreaking discovery can revolutionize our lifestyles, quality of life and longevity, while a mistake or a delay can have a dramatic impact on individuals or entire populations.

Recent advances have led to development of omics technologies, which enable the study of an individual’s genetic makeup. These technologies are driving a revolution in healthcare, guiding the development of personalized medicines and more accurate predictive or prognostic models for specific conditions or diseases.

Successful omics research and the development of omics technologies require accurate analysis of vast amounts of data. Performing this analysis cost-effectively and efficiently is incredibly challenging, considering not only the sheer volume of data that needs to be analyzed but also the critical importance of accurate analysis.

This blog post demonstrates how EPAM’s Collaborative Omics Research Accelerator™ (CORA™), powered by AWS HealthOmics, overcomes the challenges of performing cost-effective and efficient omics data analysis at scale.

Omics Computation Challenges

Organizations using omics data to further research and patient care face numerous challenges. One of them is the exponential growth of genomic data volumes, which are doubling every seven months. By 2025, the capacity needed for genomic data is estimated to reach 40 Exabytes.

Another major challenge is the growth of the role and volume of modeling and simulation (M&S), also known as biosimulation or model-informed drug discovery and development (MID3). M&S can deliver significant business, scientific, and clinical value to firms that fully utilize it as an integral part of their drug development strategy.

The need to conduct M&S at scale, coupled with exponential growth of omics data, necessitates storing and processing vast volumes of data. Storing the data locally is not only expensive but also a massive drain on resources, which is simply unsustainable. On-premises resources for genomics analysis are limited in capacity and require significant investment to keep with the continually increasing demand for both computation and storage resources.

EPAM CORA Significantly Boosts Omics Research

EPAM Collaborative Omics Research Accelerator (CORA™) for AWS HealthOmics provides life science and health care organizations with a user-friendly, secure and Good Practice (GxP) ready environment for analyzing and correlating omics data. EPAM CORA also takes full advantage of the power of AWS HealthOmics with features like multiomic and multimodal analysis, population sequencing, and fully managed bioinformatics computation.

EPAM CORA is a web-based accelerator for omics research. It provides a platform for managing highly-scalable computing environments hosted on AWS and for scripting simple-to-complex computational workflows to accelerate an organization’s omics research. A key advantage of EPAM CORA, when compared to commercial SaaS solutions, is that its platform is elastic, meaning that the resources for each computational job are allocated from AWS only when needed and then released again, helping to minimize the cost of performing multiple parallel computations on different compute instances.

EPAM CORA Key Benefits

With a convenient and user-friendly interface, EPAM CORA allows scientists to perform their research easily and flexibly in the cloud, benefitting from:

• Time Savings: Rapidly deploy the computational tools used by scientists.
• Increased Accessibility: Easily access any tool via a user-friendly interface with fine-grained access and version controls for all artifacts.
• Streamlined Cloud Migration: Streamline migrations of on-premise clusters into the cloud and provide a versatile solution for application hosting and sharing.
• Scalability: Harness elastically scalable cloud high performance computing with many CPUs and GPUs.
• Optimized Workflows: Construct complex computational workflows using AWS HealthOmics and several other workflow languages.
• Enhanced Accounting: Generate clear accounting reports for individual and team usage of AWS resources.
• Cost Savings: Utilize cost-effective and secure storage of large-scale omics data in AWS HealthOmics’ sequence, variant, and annotation storage.

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Learn more about how EPAM delivers value across the entire spectrum of life sciences and healthcare. https://www.epam.com/industries/life-sciences-and-healthcare

Discover the full range of EPAM’s AWS-based business solutions and capabilities. https://www.epam.com/services/partners/aws