Amazon and Google are on a dispute about human genetic material, claiming their rights to offer help to scientists, so that they will make new medical discoveries but also to the market share, in a field that is estimated to worth that one billion dollars per year, until 2018.
The academic institutions and the health companies are now invited to choose sides, between Google Genomics or Amazon Web Services.
This development is due to the need of a more personalized medicine science which will be based on the genetic material of each patient. For that to become a practicability, it would require enormous data quantities that would reveal how some specific genetic profiles respond to different therapies.
The cloud companies, beyond storing data, they plan to examine them in order to help scientists understand how the human DNA works in depth.
A vast variety of universities and drug manufacturing companies have already started processes of decoding to hundreds of human DNAs. The human genome is the full complement of the DNA, or genetic material, a copy of which can be found to almost every cell of the body.
Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines are also claiming a share of the market.
The genome market is today appreciated to reach 100 to 300 million dollars in value, and is expected to increase to around 1 billion dollars in 2018. Until then, researches calculate that the annual income of the whole market will come up to 50 to 75 billion dollars, which is a lot more than the 30 billion dollars that are noted at the present.
To prove their interest for their new activity, Google and Amazon, are accommodating to their systems already known genomic data sequences with no extra charge. In addition, they mentioned that using their existing customers to attract even more is something they hope to achieve in the near future.
Even though none of the two companies has revealed the quantity of data that they have under their possession, some estimations bases on analysts’ interviews and announcements from the companies, indicate that Amazon Web Services has the lead on this one.
Among other more known Google’s customer we also met the Autism Speaks institution, which wants to study the genetic base of autism and Tute Genomics, a company whose data base includes 8.5 billion variations of human DNA and can be used to find the frequency under which each variation on the DNA is found, as well as the features that it is connected to.
Amazon on the other hand, is working with Multiple Myeloma Foundation and the two of them are aiming in the collection of full genomics and other data to locate new pharmaceutical uses.
As for the charge, Amazon is charging approximately 4 to 5 dollars per month, to store a full human genome, while Google charges roughly 3 to 4 dollars for that.
Besides those services, the individual doctors can gain access to the cloud services in order to get a full picture of the genetic profile of each of their patient thus being able to understand or even foresee a potential danger or predict a side effect to some treatment.
With the cloud services giving countless kai extraordinary useful possibilities for individual humans and the whole society as well, the science of genomics will soon rise like never before. In other words, we might be witnessing the coming of a whole new era in the field of medicine. And because company such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon are involved, who knows what they will be able to do with all that profit to surprise us once again?
