A new partnership between the American Heart Association (AHA) and Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS), a cloud computing subsidiary of the online commerce giant, was recently announced to advance precision cardiovascular medicine.

The collaboration is part of AHA’s new initiative, Institute for Precision Cardiovascular Medicine, which will examine the science and practice of precision medicine in an effort to improve the health of individuals and populations.

“The AHA and Amazon Web Services both share a desire to transform the scientific enterprise for Precision Medicine by bringing together the technological capabilities of AWS and the scientific and convener roles of the AHA,” Nancy Brown, CEO of the American Heart Association, told HCB News.
“The collaboration will unite the global research community to accelerate discovery in cardiovascular health, and usher in a new era of tailored prevention and treatment that will help patients and lessen the global burden of cardiovascular disease,” she said.

AWS will also play a role in AHA’s Data Grant portfolio that will focus on four areas:

• Data mining: aimed at uncovering patterns and knowledge within existing data sets that will inform standards and protocols for organizing and categorizing current and future cardiovascular disease-based data. These grants will also focus on data harmonization steps necessary for data mining.


• Methods validation: focused on validating pre-existing methods including algorithms and analytic tools used to maximize the use of data in predicting outcomes.


• Innovative development: focused on developing tools that enrich our ability to identify novel approaches and/or tools to analyze data.


• Fellowship awards: intended to cross-train scientists interested in learning computational biology or more information about specific cohorts. The data fellowships aim to establish a future generation of researchers with enhanced skills and capabilities.

Brown said that 14 grants will be awarded to the recipients, where more than $2 million in cash awards will be provided by the AHA, along with $2.6 million in technology credits from AWS. The recipients can use the credits for free access to AWS services such as computational storage and analysis.

Precision medicine has the potential to improve, preserve and prolong health, as well as ultimately reduce overall health care costs, according to the announcement, and will be a clear improvement from the current approach, which still focuses mainly on managing symptoms and serious events when they occur.

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