AWS Provides 20M To Innovate Rapid And Accurate Patient Testing For COVID-19

Accurate testing and diagnosis at regional locations for patients with COVID-19 is critical to early intervention and treatment. Popular cloud provider, AWS has taken the initiative to offer technical support and AWS promotional credits to support the use of AWS services to advance diagnostic research for selected institutions and companies.

Recently, Chief Evangelist for the Amazon Web Services, Jeff Barr announced the Amazon Web Service (AWS) Diagnostic Development Initiative (DDI). The initiative provides support for innovation in rapid and accurate patient testing for 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19), and other diagnostic solutions to mitigate future outbreaks.

AWS has committed an initial of 20 Million over the next year to accelerate research, innovation, and development to speed the collective understanding and detection of COVID-19 along with other innovate diagnostic solutions to mitigate future infectious disease outbreaks.  

The subsidiary of Amazon will approve applications which are based factors such as applicability of research to the development of diagnostic tools and techniques for reliable, more accurate and economical testing for COVID-19, stage of diagnostic research, potential to disseminate the results and data through sharing a pipeline or software, applicability of AWS services and support within the project scope and other such. 

Currently, the initiative will be open to accredited research institutions, research consortia, and private entities who are using AWS cloud service to support research-oriented workloads for the development of point-of-care diagnostic such as testing that can be done at home or at a clinic with same-day results and other diagnostic techniques. Amidst the pandemic, the initiative will mainly emphasise on COVID-19 for now but it will also consider other infectious disease diagnostic projects in future. The initial submission period for proposals will end on June 30, 2020.