AWS expands its support of ARPA-H Sprint for Women’s Health performers

HAQM Web Services (AWS) provides innovative health researchers with the agility, adaptivity, and resilience they need to accelerate their research. Because of this, AWS expanded the scope of its commitment to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) Sprint for Women’s Health performers to include its Spark funding track awardees. These awardees focus on transformative early-stage research in women’s health.

These Spark awardees will receive AWS credits funded by AWS Social Responsibility & Impact and facilitated through the ARPA-H Investor Catalyst Hub, and technical support to guide them along their journey. “We’re excited for this collaboration with AWS to support our early-stage researchers in accelerating their commercialization journey,” stated Chelsea Schiller, Investor Catalyst Hub director.

Let’s take a look at some of the innovative research projects these awardees are pursuing:

• The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) is developing a wearable sweat sensing system for objective chronic pain assessment. Their solution will simultaneously monitor multiple types of pain biomarkers in sweat. CalTech researchers will combine those biomarkers with vital sign data and create machine learning models that predict pain levels in real-time. Dr. Wei Gao, professor of medical engineering at CalTech, predicts that “real-time objective pain measurement will transform how the medical community treats patients, removing some of the guess work out of pain management.”
• Nura Health is also focused on biomarkers and precision medicine. Endometriosis diagnoses can take an average of 5-10 years to diagnose due to requiring an invasive surgical procedure for confirmation. Nura Health hopes to reduce that timeline to just days—and eliminate the need for surgical confirmation—by launching a platform that measures unique biomarkers found in blood while simultaneously analyzing genetic profiles in order to recommend precise, optimal treatments. “Our solution will bring faster diagnosis and a personalized treatment plan for women, significantly revamping the path to disease detection and symptom alleviation,” Varun Kapoor, co-founder and CEO of Nura Health, stated.
• Ancilia Biosciences is initially applying its unique technology to develop a novel approach to treating bacterial vaginosis, a common, recurring condition that is associated with preterm birth, sexually transmitted infections, and infertility. “Our goal is to apply our advanced analytic and biological tools to unlock the vast potential of an entirely new class of therapies with major applications in both women’s health and broader indications,” declared Dr. Alexandra Sakatos, co-founder and CEO at Ancilia Biosciences.
• Focused on transforming cancer treatment to a single drug, Dr. Armand Cognetta, founder and CEO of General Proximity, describes their solution as “pioneering proximity medicine in the battle against women’s cancer.” Their solution uses Induced Proximity Medicines to target a protein prevalent in breast and gynecological cancers.

These awardees will use AWS purpose-built health services designed to accelerate innovation. AWS provides the most comprehensive set of Internet of Things, artificial intelligence, and purpose-built health services designed to handle complex health data. These awardees will leverage AWS HealthOmics to transform their genomic, transcriptomic, and other omics data into insight. They can gain insights faster, supporting their efforts to move from idea to market with virtually unlimited compute capacity with the complete suite of high performance computing (HPC) products and services on AWS.

The agility and scope of AWS services means health researchers have the flexibility they need to explore their research questions. Learn more about AWS health and life sciences services, and see how scientists leveraged AWS HPC tools to unlock disease insights. Then contact us for help in accelerating your research.

Acknowledgement: This research was, in part, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The views and conclusions contained in this blog post are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the United States Government.