AWS for Industries

Healthcare and Life Sciences: Top 10 announcements from AWS re:Invent 2024

Technological breakthroughs don’t just happen—they’re carefully orchestrated through purpose-built tools, strategic innovations, and a deep understanding of industry-specific challenges. At AWS re:Invent 2024, healthcare and life sciences customers explored how the latest innovations in generative AI and machine learning (ML) can transform how we approach medical research, patient care, and scientific discovery.

In the weeks leading up to re:Invent, our purpose-built HCLS services announced features that provide new capabilities in drug discovery, biomedical data management, and patient experience:

  • AWS HealthOmics announced protein language (pLM) model orchestration, call caching, and intermediate file access. pLM capabilities streamline protein engineering efforts for applications such as drug development, enzyme engineering, and biosensor development. Call caching and intermediate file access work together to significantly speed up iterative development cycles and reduce processing times.
  • AWS HealthImaging now supports image modalities such as whole slide microscopy, ultrasound, and cardiology that use lossy image compression. This expands upon the modalities that are supported in the HealthImaging DICOM data store, such as X-Ray, CT, and MRI images. With this enhancement, HealthImaging enables a broader array of software applications with the ability to store, analyze, and share medical images at petabyte scale.
  • AWS HealthLake is making it easier for healthcare and life sciences organizations to manage patient data and comply with regulations around the world. With new features like FHIR versioning, expanded regional support to eu-west-2 AWS Region, and support for more health system frameworks, HealthLake helps ensure that health records are accurate, up-to-date, and accessible to those who need them.

The potential is extraordinary: from accelerating drug development and personalizing treatment protocols to re-imagining clinical workflows and predictive diagnostics. Realizing this potential demands a comprehensive, responsible approach that bridges cutting-edge technology with the rigorous demands of healthcare innovation. With that in mind, here are the top 10 announcements from AWS re:Invent important to healthcare and life sciences customers.

Amazon Nova

Amazon Nova is a family of of state-of-the-art foundation models (FMs) that delivers frontier intelligence and industry leading price performance, available exclusively in Amazon Bedrock. Healthcare and life sciences organizations can use Amazon Nova to lower costs and latency for many generative AI tasks including analyzing complex research publications, company documents, and charts and diagrams. Users can build sophisticated AI agents from across a range of intelligence classes optimized for enterprise workloads. The Nova model family includes Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, and Amazon Nova Pro, understanding models that accept text, image, or video inputs and generate text output. (Announcement)

Amazon Bedrock

Amazon Bedrock helps healthcare and life sciences customers build AI applications to extract insights that matter, with new features that make building and deploying generative AI applications even easier:

  • Model Distillation automates the process of creating a distilled model for your specific use case by generating responses from a large foundation model (FM) called a teacher model and fine-tuning a smaller FM called a student model with the generated responses. This provides a faster and more cost-efficient model with accuracy close to the teacher model, for your use case. (Announcement)
  • With Automated Reasoning checks in Amazon Bedrock Guardrails you can mathematically validate the accuracy of responses generated by large language models (LLMs) and prevent factual errors from hallucinations. (Announcement)
  • With multi-agent collaboration on Amazon Bedrock, developers can build, deploy, and manage multiple specialized agents working together seamlessly to tackle more intricate, multi-step workflows. The platform now supports Custom Orchestration, enabling developers to implement specialized strategies like Plan and Solve, Tree of Thought, and Standard Operating Procedures for more controlled and efficient task execution. (Announcement)
  • Amazon Bedrock Marketplace provides generative AI developers access to over 100 publicly available and proprietary foundation models (FMs), in addition to Amazon Bedrock’s industry-leading, serverless models. (Announcement)
  • Prompt caching is a new capability that can reduce costs by up to 90% and latency by up to 85% for supported models by caching frequently used prompts across multiple API calls. (Announcement)
  • Amazon Bedrock Data Automation helps developers reduce development time and effort, making it easier to build intelligent document processing, media analysis, and other multimodal data-centric automation solutions. BDA offers features such as visual grounding with confidence scores for explainability and built-in hallucination mitigation. (Announcement)

Amazon SageMaker

Amazon SageMaker now includes virtually all of the components you need for data exploration, preparation and integration, big data processing, fast SQL analytics, machine learning (ML) model development and training, and generative AI application development. New capabilities include:

Amazon Q Developer

The most capable generative AI-powered assistant for building, operating, and transforming software just got better, and even easier to use.

  • Amazon Q Developer Agents autonomously classify and organize application assets and create comprehensive code documentation to understand and expand the knowledge base of our customers. (Announcement)
  • Amazon Q Developer within SageMaker Canvas helps healthcare and life sciences users build accurate, production-quality ML models through natural language interactions, even if they don’t have ML expertise. Amazon Q Developer guides these users by breaking down their business problems and analyzing their data to recommend step-by-step guidance for building custom ML models. (Announcement)

Amazon DataZone

Along with new features beneficial for healthcare and life sciences organizations, Amazon DataZone now offers general availability of Data Lineage. The Data Lineage capability automatically captures lineage from AWS Glue and Amazon Redshift, allowing users to visualize data movement from source to consumption. Organizations can track data transformations over time and compare changes across an asset’s history, enabling comprehensive auditing and validation. New features for metadata enforcement rules help healthcare and life sciences organizations align with metadata standards and ensure HIPAA-compliant data sharing across research teams, clinical departments, and partner institutions. (Announcement)

AWS Security Incident Response

AWS Security Incident Response is a new service that helps you prepare for, respond to, and recover from security events. This service offers automated monitoring and investigation of security findings to free up your resources from routine tasks, communication and collaboration features to streamline response coordination, and direct 24/7 access to the AWS Customer Incident Response Team (CIRT). (Announcement)

Amazon EC2 Trn2

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Trn2 instances and preview of Trn2 UltraServers, powered by AWS Trainium2 chips are now GA. Available via EC2 Capacity Blocks, Trn2 instances and UltraServers are the most powerful EC2 compute solutions for deep learning and generative AI training and inference. Life sciences and medical research organizations can use Trn2 instances to train and deploy new biology foundation models and health-specific LLMs. (Announcement)

Amazon Kendra GenAI Index

Amazon Kendra GenAI Index is a new index in Amazon Kendra designed for RAG and intelligent search to help organizations build digital assistants and intelligent search experiences more efficiently and effectively. This index offers high retrieval accuracy, using advanced semantic models and the latest information retrieval technologies and can be integrated with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and Amazon Q Business. Customers can also integrate Knowledge Bases with other Bedrock Services like Guardrails, Prompt Flows, and Agents to build advanced generative AI applications. (Announcement)

Amazon S3

Amazon S3 capability enhancements include:

  • Amazon S3 Tables deliver the first cloud object store with built-in Apache Iceberg support, and the easiest way to store tabular data at scale. S3 Tables are specifically optimized for analytics workloads, resulting in up to 3x faster query throughput and up to 10x higher transactions per second compared to self-managed tables. This reduces operational overhead by performing continual table maintenance to automatically optimize query efficiency and storage cost over time, even as your data lake scales and evolves. Available in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), and US West (Oregon) Regions. (Announcement)
  • Amazon S3 Metadata is a new way to help you instantly discover and understand your S3 data with automated, easily-queried metadata that updates in near real-time. S3 Metadata supports object metadata, which includes system-defined details like the size and source of the object, and custom metadata, which can allow organizations to annotate unstructured R&D data with information like quality scores, sample IDs, and experiment IDs. (Announcement)
  • The AWS Transfer Family now includes web apps that allow authenticated users to easily manage files in S3 buckets through a no-code interface. This enables seamless file exchange between researchers at academic labs, CROs, and biopharmas without requiring desktop clients or technical expertise. (Announcement)

Amazon DynamoDB Global Tables

Now in preview, Amazon DynamoDB global tables supports multi-Region strong consistency. DynamoDB global tables is a fully managed, serverless, multi-Region, and multi-active database used by tens of thousands of customers. With this new capability, global pharmaceutical companies can now build highly available multi-Region applications with a Recovery Point Objective (RPO) of zero, achieving the highest level of resilience. (Announcement)

Watch all re:Invent Breakout Session Videos on-demand

HCLS Innovation Talk: Accelerating healthcare & life sciences innovation with generative AI (feat. Genentech, Merck, Eli Lilly, Pieces Tech, and Cleveland Clinic)

Healthcare sessions

Life Sciences Sessions

So many amazing announcements came out of re:Invent in Las Vegas this year, and we are excited to see what our industry can build with this new technology. To learn more about how leading healthcare and life sciences companies are building breakthroughs on AWS, visit https://thinkwithwp.com/health.

TAGS: ,
Oiendrilla Das

Oiendrilla Das

Oiendrilla Das is Customer Advocacy Lead for Life Sciences and Genomics Marketing for AWS. She comes from a background in life sciences marketing, with a specialty focus on life sciences and cloud computing. Oiendrilla holds an MBA degree in marketing and completed her engineering in Biotechnology prior to her MBA degree.

Jennifer Rouse

Jennifer Rouse

Jennifer Rouse is the Worldwide Head of Healthcare Marketing for AWS. She has held leadership roles in large companies such as IBM and Cisco, as well as two cloud-based startups, and most recently was a global analyst and advisor for Forrester Research/Sirius Decisions. Jennifer has spent much of her career in companies making a difference in traditionally under-served industries, such as public sector.

Lee Tessler

Lee Tessler

Lee Tessler, Ph.D. is a Principal Technology Strategist for the Healthcare & Life Sciences industry at AWS. His focus is on cloud architectures for modernizing R&D, clinical trials, manufacturing, and patient engagement. Prior to joining AWS, he launched products in the areas of bioinformatics, drug discovery, diagnostics, lab instruments, and pharma manufacturing. Lee holds a Ph.D. in computational biology from Washington University in St. Louis and Sc.B. from Brown University.