Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced that Lyell Immunopharma will transport its cloud infrastructure to AWS as the company’s standard for machine learning (ML) workloads, AWS reported on Wednesday. 

“Lyell runs on AWS because we enable them to build and test applications quickly, and gain insights into vast amounts of data, with the goal of enabling them to bring new therapies to market, which is so important in a world where we are all touched by someone who has been afflicted with cancer,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. 

Lyell will leverage AWS’s scalable infrastructure to run its secure data and analytics platform and support its high-performance computing workloads to accelerate the research of new cell therapies as it searches for cures for cancer.

AWS’s services will help Lyell analyze insights in scientific data on how the immune system can fight cancer, as well as expedite the company’s research. One of Lyell's recent initiatives will  develop immunotherapies with high performance computing (HPC) clusters. The project will help scientists design new protein structures to engineer immune cells that are more capable of fighting cancer. 

“We chose AWS because its unmatched portfolio of cloud services provides us with the environment and resources we need to research, design, and develop immunotherapies, all of which wouldn’t be possible at the speed and scale we are looking for, without the elasticity of the cloud,” said Rick Klausner, M.D., Founder and Chief Executive Officer. 

AWS’s secure and elastic compute capacity will enable Lyell to design and test potential new cell therapy constructs at a faster rate. Lyell will be able to conduct 30 simulations in 10 hours as opposed to a single simulation in four weeks, before joining AWS. 

Lyell will build a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and leverage AWS analytics services like Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR to analyze petabytes of research, clinical and manufacturing data to gain insights into immune cell functionality faster than before. 

Lyell will also incorporate Amazon SageMaker to enable scientists to build, train and deploy ML models. The models enable automated image analysis and optimization of protein structures, which will facilitate Lyell’s mission to cure cancer.

“By adopting cloud-first strategies on AWS and leveraging the most comprehensive set of cloud services in the industry, innovators like Lyell are able to build and scale their businesses, disrupting longstanding business models and inventing new ones,” added Clayville. 

About Amazon Web Services

For 14 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. 

AWS offers over 175 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, robotics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management from 76 Availability Zones (AZs) within 24 geographic regions, with announced plans for nine more Availability Zones and three more AWS Regions in Indonesia, Japan, and Spain. 

Millions of customers—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—trust AWS to power their infrastructure, become more agile, and lower costs.

Mark Lewis, director of research and engineering for modernization at the Department of Defense (DoD), said DoD is shifting from the "trusted foundry" model toward a “zero trust” approach when it comes to procuring microelectronics due to risks of insider threats, DoD News reported Tuesday.

"You depend on data, you depend on validation and verification, you depend on standards that will make sure that what you have has no surprises, doesn't have back doors that are going to injure you or damage you, and doesn't act in a malicious way," Lewis said of the zero trust approach. "We're actually extremely comfortable now — we believe that the technologies already exist for us to be able to do that."

He said he believes the adoption of zero trust will help the department gain access to modern technology platforms and keep pace with strategic competitors. "Our goal is to allow the Department of Defense to purchase on the commercial curves, from state-of-the-art," he added.

In addition to microelectronics, Lewis also discussed the Pentagon's other 10 tech priorities, including 5G, cyber, autonomy, artificial intelligence, biotechnology and hypersonics.

The U.S. Navy has announced a new wave of small business innovation research funds for projects that tackle topics that the service branch has expressed interest in.

The service branch said Friday it opened the 20.2 Broad Agency Announcement pre-release on May 6 covering 55 Navy-specific topics.

Interested parties may begin submitting proposals until the pre-release period's completion. The new BAA follows the previous 20.4 announcement that will stop accepting applications on May 28.

“The goals of the program are to stimulate tech innovation, increase small business participation, foster participation by disadvantaged firms and increase private sector commercialization of technical research and development,” said Jennifer Stewart, technology transfer and SBIR manager at Naval Surface Warfare Center Corona in California.

The Inland Empire region within Southern California offers support to help small businesses submit proposals and pursue opportunities under the new BAA.

Rear Adm. Kathleen Creighton, cybersecurity division director at the Chief of Naval Operations Office, said the boosted amount of teleworking due to the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in cybersecurity risks, National Defense Magazine reported Monday.

She said at a Navy League virtual conference that the teleworking boost has created openings for adversaries to attack, and the service branch addresses this issue through the creation of new policies.

The new policies include approaches to renew expired access cards and a boost in the capacity of devices and networks that Navy personnel use for teleworking.

The service branch also sees the need to accelerate the implementation of Microsoft 365 and other information technology modernization efforts.