Amazon, Google race to get your DNA into the cloud

NEW YORK: Amazon.com Inc is in a race against Google Inc to store data on human DNA, seeking both bragging rights in helping scientists make new medical discoveries and market share in a business that may be worth US$1 billion a year by 2018.

Academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings - Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services - spurring the two to one-up each other as they win high-profile genomics business, according to interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts.    

    That growth is being propelled by, among other forces, the push for personalized medicine, which aims to base treatments on a patient's DNA profile. Making that a reality will require enormous quantities of data to reveal how particular genetic profiles respond to different treatments.

Already, universities and drug manufacturers are embarking on projects to sequence the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people.

The human genome is the full complement of DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which is found in nearly every cell of the body.

    Clients view Google and Amazon as doing a better job storing genomics data than they can do using their own computers, keeping it secure, controlling costs and allowing it to be easily shared.

    The cloud companies are going beyond storage to offer analytical functions that let scientists make sense of DNA data. Microsoft Corp and International Business Machines are also competing for a slice of the market. The "cloud" refers to data or software that physically resides in a server and is accessible via the internet, which allows users to access it without downloading it to their own computer.

    Now an estimated US$100 million to US$300 million business globally, the cloud genomics market is expected to grow to US$1 billion by 2018, said research analyst Daniel Ives of investment bank FBR Capital. By that time, the entire cloud market should have US$50 billion to US$75 billion in annual revenue, up from about US$30 billion now.

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