Using Cloud Computing To Quickly Diagnose Cancer: A Pathwork Diagnostics Case Study

Pathwork Diagnostics is in the business of diagnosing tumors — bringing a whole new meaning to "business critical". The right treatment is dependent upon the origin of the tumor, which cannot always be determined with standard tests. As a result, the company has developed a model that can compare the genomic information of tumors with known-origin to those with unknown origins. But building this model takes massive computing power, which is out of reach for a small bioinformatics company. Pathwork turned to Amazon's EC2 cloud platform and Univa UD UniCloud, and by leveraging a low-cost, high-scale, and flexibly priced infrastructure, Pathwork developed this product in less than two months. It now delivers results to oncologists and their patients within a week so that the best course of treatment can be started immediately. Running this high-performance computing (HPC) application on a cloud infrastructure lets Pathwork increase production volume while optimizing development.