Brenda Marie Rivers
Teresa Carlson, vice president of Amazon Web Services’ worldwide public sector business and a 2020 Wash100 awardee, has unveiled a company program meant to help customers research and develop diagnostic tools for detecting the novel coronavirus known as COVID-19.
She wrote in a blog entry posted Friday that AWS will contribute up to $20M to its Diagnostic Development Initiative to drive the use of cloud technology in efforts to mitigate coronavirus and other infectious diseases.
The program seeks to encourage commercial and academic organizations to apply cloud platforms when developing point-of-care diagnostic or test procedures that can render same-day results and be done through clinics or at home.
"As COVID-19 continues to spread, we are acutely aware of the impact this is having on families, businesses, and communities," Carlson noted.
"This is a global health emergency that will only be resolved by governments, businesses, academia, and individuals working together to better understand this virus and ultimately find a cure."
According to Carlson, organizations need computing systems along with machine learning and analytics tools to process data sets necessary to perform diagnosis.
Thirty-five companies and research institutions worldwide committed to sign up for AWS' initiative, which has a technical advisory group comprised of health policy and scientific professionals.
