Amazon competing with Google to store Data on Human DNA

Amazon.com Inc is competing with Google Inc to enable data storage on human DNA. Amazon will pave the way for scientists to come up with medical discoveries and gain market share in a business that may be worth $1 billion a year by 2018.

Interviews with researchers, industry consultants and analysts have helped understand that academic institutions and healthcare companies are picking sides between their cloud computing offerings. Endeavor to develop personalized medicine is a driving force for that growth. A patient's DNA profile is very important for developing medicines as per specific needs of the patient.

Universities and drug manufacturers have already showed interests in projects to do sequencing of the genomes of hundreds of thousands of people. Google and Amazon have been learnt getting more success to store genomics data than they can do using their own computers. This has helped both the companies to keep the data secure, reduce costs and share it with ease.

Microsoft Corp. and International Business Machines are also in the race to get a slice of the market. Craig Venter, who led a private effort to sequence the human genome in the 1990s, said the cloud has a great potential to be the next frontier in medical field.

Matt Wood, general manager for Data Science at Amazon Web Services, is of the belief that cloud demand in genomics is all set to grow rapidly given the amount of data being created.