Precision Health Research, Singapore (Precise) and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are teaming up to establish a Joint Innovation Center (JIC) to support Singapore’s national precision medicine programme.
The centre will develop the cloud infrastructure and genomics systems needed to store, process and analyse data from the programme’s third phase, which aims to enrol about 450,000 participants between 2025 and 2031.
Precise will lead the programme and remain the custodian of all participant data while AWS will provide the cloud platform and co-development support alongside implementation partner Temus.
Data governance will remain in Singapore and follow the country’s bioethics and data-protection requirements.
Singapore’s precision medicine programme began in 2017 with a reference collection of 10,000 genomes. Its second phase, launched in 2020, sequenced 100,000 participants.
Phase III will include patients with a broader range of health conditions to allow researchers to study how genetics, lifestyle and environmental factors interact in real-world clinical settings.
The programme could also help address a longstanding limitation in genomic research. Many large studies have focused on people of European ancestry, which can reduce the applicability of some findings to Asian populations. Singapore’s Chinese, Malay and Indian communities offer an opportunity to build datasets that better represent Asia’s diversity.
Findings from Phase II have contributed to Singapore’s precision medicine efforts, including the implementation of a national genetic testing programme for Familial Hypercholesterolemia, an inherited condition linked to a higher risk of premature heart disease.
The JIC will address the infrastructure challenges associated with Phase III, including data storage, processing and analysis under strict governance requirements.
At full scale, the programme is expected to manage about 60 petabytes (PB) of genomic data. A single whole genome can generate hundreds of gigabytes, while computing requirements vary sharply between intensive primary processing and the longer-term storage of approved outputs for authorised researchers.
Cloud infrastructure will allow Precise to scale computing and storage resources according to the needs of each stage, while keeping the data in Singapore under Precise’s ownership and control.
The teams will assess how services including AWS HealthOmics, AWS Batch, AWS Fargate, and Amazon EMR can work together to support different types of genomic analysis.
AWS has supported Singapore’s national precision medicine programme since 2018. The new agreement shifts the relationship from cloud capacity provision to a dedicated co-development programme, giving Precise a technical counterpart to work through infrastructure decisions as the programme expands.
The collaboration will also focus on developing expertise in access control, auditing and cost governance — capabilities needed to operate production genomics systems in the cloud.
By working directly with Precise, AWS and Temus aim to strengthen local skills and build expertise that can support the programme throughout its lifecycle.
JIC will provide a cloud foundation for Singapore’s precision medicine programme while creating infrastructure, datasets and tools that could support researchers and institutions across Asia.
PHOTO CAPTION: Singapore’s Health Minister Ong Ye Kung delivering his speech at the event.
