Amazon is no small player in the world of commerce. Not many people know, that it’s also branching out and looking into research and medicine. As it grows, the AHA begins a new precision medicine platform with Amazon, making data accessible to other researchers.
Precision medicine is making headway in the world of prescription medicine. This type of medicine is made specifically for a patient based on their individual needs and diagnosis.
Most medicine treats a specific problem, but not all people react the same way or even need certain attributes of the medicine. Additionally, people’s DNA allows the doctor to know exactly what that person needs.
Precision medicine could save thousands of more lives each year. However, it is difficult because accessing data from other resources can be tricky.
What is Precision Medicine?
According to the Precision Medicine Initiative:
“Precision medicine is an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.”
What makes precision medicine different than traditional assessments is the reliance on genomic data and other data to decide which treatments will be more effective.
Since reliance on genomic data is relatively new, researchers are only just beginning to find out the revolutionary insights in the human genetic code.
Since genetic testing is getting cheaper and quicker, more researchers are finding opportunities to collect larger volumes of data from a variety of groups.
When you take genomic data and socioeconomic, pharmaceutical, and clinical information, researchers can find the effectiveness of particular treatments.
They apply analytics to these integrated datasets to observe patterns in treatments and identify which genetic variations correlate with successful treatments.
Finally, clinical trials are used to test and validate these hypotheses.
Once the results meet strict scientific standards, they may offer clinical guidelines and future best practices for treating specific conditions.
AHA Begins a New Precision Medicine Platform with Amazon
For that reason, Amazon Web Services is proudly teaming up with the American Heart Association.
They’re bringing data collections and research to a cloud-based platform.
This allows doctors that are part of the program to access the information from anywhere and from any other doctor.
As the AHA begins a new precision medicine platform with Amazon, they will be focusing on cardiovascular precision medicine. “The precision medicine platform is like everybody is invited to the same party–all the data tools and researchers under one roof,” stated Joseph Wu, MD, PhD, director of the Standford Cardiovascular Institute.
Because heart disease is the cause of about 25% of deaths each year, this new partnership is groundbreaking. Doctors will share information and make new discoveries to produce results that will save lives.
For example, someone may have a gene they’ve inherited that makes their cholesterol higher than the average person’s, regardless what they do. Learning how to effectively treat that type of person can help them live longer and with lower cholesterol.
It will be exciting to see the further advancements that come forward in cardiovascular precision medicine from this convergence. The AHA is getting that much closer to helping each individual find a solution to their heart health problems.
Watch the full announcement here.