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AMILI helps advance precision medicine by building microbiome library on Amazon Web Services
This is a guest post by Jeremy Lim, chief executive officer (CEO) of AMILI; Vivek Ravindran, chief technology officer (CTO) of AMILI; Raghunathan Shanmugam, engineering lead at AMILI; with Edwin Sandanaraj, genomics solutions architect at Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services).
One hundred trillion tiny organisms called microbes live in the gastrointestinal system within our body. But these are more than just bacteria; this collection of fungi and viruses—known as the microbiome—may hold the key to better health.
AMILI is a healthcare technology (HealthTech) company based in Singapore that seeks to advance precision medicine and personalized health and nutrition by harnessing the potential of the microbiome. AMILI uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) on Amazon Web Services (Amazon Web Services) to comprehensively quantify and characterize gut microbiomes, with the aim to build and curate the world’s largest multi-ethnic Asia microbiome database.
Improving lives begins with insights from AI and ML
By examining the different microbiomes of healthy and ill individuals, researchers today are discovering how microbiome profiles influence our susceptibility to diseases, and whether they can be modified to prevent certain diseases, such as diabetes and cancer.
AMILI recently worked with Professor Pierce Chow, senior consultant surgeon at the National Cancer Centre, to study the microbiomes of patients at a high risk of primary liver cancer, aimed at diagnosing the disease more accurately and earlier. AMILI is also involved in more than 40 other research projects, collaborating with medical and academic partners, such as the National University of Singapore, Agency for Science Technology and Research, and Monash University. These research projects aim to answer a wide range of critical questions about microbes to predict the onset of diseases and discover their potential applications against metabolic and neurological disorders.
At the core of AMILI’s work is its proprietary platform, PRIME. The platform uses AI and ML to help it better understand the microbiome’s complex composition and interactions to discover new associations.
Along with the microbiome profiles, AMILI also collects information on diet and lifestyle choices. This data is used to continually train its algorithms in PRIME and build expert models for the different areas of medical science.
Scientists, medical advisors, and data scientists use PRIME to identify and analyze microbiome profiles associated with higher risks of specific diseases such as obesity and Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBS). PRIME is also used to study the gut health effects of food and identify food clusters based on the microbiome type, both of which are relevant to food retailers and manufacturers.
Using the power of the cloud to drive research
To build the library of microbiomes, AMILI uses next-generation sequencing technologies to analyze the genome data, before using PRIME to interrogate the outcomes and generate precision gut microbiome reports for genome-guided healthcare decisions.
As the analysis of a single microbiome can take up to 1 TB, AMILI built its platform in the Amazon Web Services Cloud to deliver microbiome insights rapidly at scale, without having to worry about spending a significant amount of time maintaining its infrastructure.
AMILI receives a dynamic volume of workloads, ranging from hundreds to thousands of samples every month. The team built an agile and scalable analytic platform on Amazon Web Services to handle compute-intensive tasks at scale. The current microbiome analysis platform was able to achieve the dynamic scalability of varying sample workloads seamlessly on the cloud. The microbiome analysis architecture (Figure 1) demonstrates the capability of an automated system to run microbiome analyses at scale on Amazon Web Services.
The AMILI sequencing partners, which are external sequencing laboratories, process the DNA samples into readable DNA sequence data, which is used in molecular biology for studying genomes and proteins. Sequence analysis is a broad field of research with sub-domains, and aligning sequences can reveal important information about their structural and functional sites. The database maintains integrity between different nodes to support data quality.
The classic virtual machine (VM) system the AMILI team deployed, before moving to Amazon Web Services, was able to handle four microbiome analyses per day due to the procurement nature and scaling challenges. Now, after moving to Amazon Web Services, the current microbiome analysis architecture system can achieve 1,000 microbiome analyses in six hours using Amazon Web Services serverless capabilities, such as Amazon Web Services Batch,
Plus, the current platform is architected with modularized docker images managed in Amazon ECR and Amazon ECS and fully integrated with Amazon Web Services Batch. This enables AMILI’s research and development team to quickly experiment with novel tools and integrate with pipelines in order to accelerate innovations to market. Their scientists explore novel pipelines, so an agile environment for continuous integration with the platform is an essential need for enhancing business outcomes.
As the microbiome library grows exponentially, business operations at AMILI require an extremely durable, flexible, and cost-effective storage environment to manage its precise microbiome data. Amazon Simple Storage Service (
Meeting compliance requirements for the health and research industry with Amazon Web Services
Business operations at AMILI handle private and sensitive patient information, so the microbiome platform is required to meet regulatory requirements. By building the microbiome platform on Amazon Web Services, the team quickly designed the platform with the essential services needed to adopt ISO 27001 certification for the microbiome workflows. Importantly,
Learn more about Amazon Web Services for healthcare
Using Amazon Web Services, the team developed AMILI with a scalable, elastic, and cost-efficient infrastructure, allowing them to focus on building its product and data pipelines. This helps drive the discovery of insights that will, in turn, advance precision medicine in the clinical realm and personalized health and nutrition in the consumer segment. Find out more about
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The mentioned AWS GenAI Services service names relating to generative AI are only available or previewed in the Global Regions. Amazon Web Services China promotes AWS GenAI Services relating to generative AI solely for China-to-global business purposes and/or advanced technology introduction.
