Owkin and AWS collaborate on Generative AI for Precision Medicine

Owkin, a TechBio that combines the best of human and artificial intelligence to find the right treatment for every patient, announced they are working with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to transform drug discovery, de-risk and accelerate clinical trials, and develop AI diagnostics. Owkin will leverage AWS’s proven global infrastructure and secure, extensive and reliable cloud platform to enhance data operations, optimize for operational excellence, and drive forward research in precision medicine.

Thomas Clozel, cofounder and CEO of Owkin: “Owkin was founded with the belief that the future of precision medicine is in technologies that are able to unlock insights from the vast amount of patient data in hospitals and research centers in a privacy-preserving and secure way. Beyond our cutting-edge technologies, our strongest asset is in the power of collective intelligence through collaboration. Teaming up with AWS enables us to harness the power, security, and flexibility of the cloud, unlocking new possibilities for our research initiatives.”

Owkin and AWS aim to accelerate innovation in biotech using high-performance computing and machine learning tools. By integrating Owkin’s specialized research and development in biotech with AWS’s secure and scalable cloud infrastructure and services, Owkin can meet its petabyte-level storage needs, develop generative AI applications, and build and adapt foundation models. Owkin will use Amazon SageMaker to build, train, and deploy machine learning models, optimize the processing of high-quality data at scale, and advance the deployment of its portfolio of AI solutions through research partners, pathology labs and biopharma, ultimately better servicing patient health outcomes.

Owkin and experts from AWS’s Healthcare and Life Sciences team, who bring hands-on experience from pharma, medical device, biotech, and government health and regulatory organizations, will work to harness technology to address critical challenges in precision medicine and find the right treatment for every patient. Utilizing their respective expertise, Owkin and AWS aim to facilitate ground-breaking discoveries and drive the development of transformative solutions for global healthcare challenges.

Dan Sheeran, General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at AWS, said: “The cloud and the advent of computational biochemistry significantly accelerated the pace of innovation in healthcare and life sciences, and applying generative AI enables another huge leap forward. We are excited to support Owkin in their journey to lower costs and discover and develop better, more targeted treatments faster with flexible, secure, and scalable infrastructure and fit for purpose generative AI tools.”

Owkin will use AWS’s high performance, cost-effective, and scalable infrastructure to build and deploy its applications, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) UltraClusters of P5 instances, powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs and AWS’s state-of-the-art networking and scalability. These instances support up to 3,200 Gbps of networking using second-generation Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) technology, enabling Owkin to scale up to 20,000 H100 GPUs in EC2 UltraClusters for on-demand access to supercomputer-class performance. P5 instances help accelerate the time-to-train machine learning models, reducing training time from days to hours. Owkin is also looking to experiment with AWS chips purpose built for the cloud, including AWS Trainium, a high-performance machine learning accelerator, and AWS Graviton, a general purpose CPU delivering the best price performance for a broad range of workloads.

As stated in the AWS Digital Sovereignty Pledge, Owkin will have full control over their data, leveraging some of the strongest sovereignty controls in market today, including data encryption whether the data is in transit, at rest, or in memory, data residency guardrails, and specialized hardware and software to prevent outside access during processing on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This will allow Owkin to continue to build strong and secure partnerships, while still generating and collaborating with the highest quality data. Owkin will also benefit from AWS’s comprehensive compliance controls, supporting 143 security standards and compliance certifications, to help partners meet regulatory requirements around the globe.