University of Arizona researchers accelerate rare pediatric disease drug repurposing with AWS

This article describes how University of Arizona researchers use AWS services to accelerate drug repurposing for rare pediatric neurodevelopmental disorders.

• Integrated AWS HealthOmics, SageMaker AI, Amazon Bedrock, and Quick Research into a unified research pipeline
• AWS HealthOmics processes sequencing data and produces RNA signatures and candidate compounds
• SageMaker AI runs DNA and RNA foundation models to predict patient responses to drugs
• Amazon Bedrock provides large language models for AI-assisted coding and hypothesis validation
• Quick Research synthesizes literature across candidate drugs, reducing review time from hours to 10-15 minutes
• Lab scaled from one pilot user to seven Quick licenses across all team members
• Enables researchers without coding expertise to access and analyze genomic data

The cloud-based pipeline allows the eight-person lab to evaluate more drug candidates per gene, expanding treatment possibilities for children with rare disorders often overlooked by pharmaceutical companies.