Amazon AWS (Photo: Public Relations)
This week the re:invent conference, the annual global conference of AWS, Amazon's cloud services division, was held in Vegas.
In the opening speech of Adam Selfsky, CEO of AWS, Liz Humans also appeared. Humans is the CEO of the start-up Lyell (in Hebrew Lyell, not to be confused with the large pharmaceutical company of the same name), which specializes in cellular therapies for cancer, and specifically - cell reprogramming T (white cells) to make them effective in killing cancer cells.
Cellular medicine is a relatively new and exciting field in cancer treatment - the patient is injected with genetically modified cells, specially sewn to fight the cancer in his body, which is also known as adapted cellular therapy or ACT, for its acronym in English.
Cellular therapies have been found to be an effective and less harmful treatment than chemotherapy against types of cancer such as blood cancer (leukemia).
the problem?
Treatment with cellular therapy is currently not relevant to the treatment of most types of cancer (90 percent of them) that form stable masses, i.e., tumors.
Lyell want to convert and adapt the cellular therapy so that it is also effective for the treatment of the other types of cancer that form tumors.
How is it done?
They reprogram white cells.
The main problem in fighting cancer is that the cancer cells "tired" the white cells that fight them, and they become ineffective.
Lyell takes living cells from patients, reprograms them - and returns them to the patient's body to fight cancer.
If this sounds to you on the verge of science fiction, it is not by chance, this company is at the forefront of medical technology, and more than half a billion dollars have already been invested in it by pharmaceutical giants such as GSK.
Liz Homans, CEO of the startup Lyell (Photo: Amazon)
In their activity, Lyell completely relies on the cloud infrastructure of Amazon AWS, and this is what Humans talked about at the conference this week where I was present.
Lyle basically relies on Amazon's cloud services for the entire chain of handling their experimenters.
The startup, which operates in a sensitive medical field, operates without paper at all, with all digital documentation.
The information handling chain at the jump, as you can imagine, is very sensitive.
Not only is it medical, confidential and personal information, there must be no confusion in the registration, and God forbid that one patient's cell dose be mistakenly injected into another patient.
Lyle uses AWS from registration and scheduling, through careful monitoring of the harvested cells that go to their factory for reprogramming and mass production of the patient's specific cell "product" until it is returned and injected into him by infusion.
Humans says that thanks to the systems, their employees can also be at home on the sofa, and if God forbid there is a production failure with one batch or another - they will immediately receive an alert on their mobile phone.
Lyell's case, which is full of innovation, reminds us that maybe cloud services in themselves are a bit boring field, but their uses, capabilities, and contribution to humanity, is often and without exaggeration - changing and saving lives.
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