A Joint Innovation Center program for national-scale genomics: PRECISE and AWS

(L-R pictured): Ms Elsie Tan, Country Manager, Worldwide Public Sector, Singapore, AWS; Mr. Ong Ye Kung, Minister for Health and Coordinating Minister for Social Policies; and Prof. Patrick Tan, Executive Director, PRECISE

PRECISE leads the program and remains the custodian of all participant data. AWS provides the technology platform and co-development support in collaboration with its implementation partner, Temus. AWS does not access, use, or keep any participant data. Governance stays in Singapore, in line with the country’s bioethics and data-protection requirements.

The program AWS is supporting
Phase III of the program, announced in November 2025, plans to enroll approximately 450,000 participants between 2025 and 2031. Phase I, which began in 2017, created a reference of 10,000 genomes. Phase II, from 2020, sequenced 100,000 participants. Phase III will include patients with a range of health conditions, so researchers can study how genetics, lifestyle, and environment interact in real-world clinical settings.

Large genomic studies have historically featured people of European ancestry, which limits how well some findings apply to Asian populations. Singapore’s Chinese, Malay, and Indian communities give the national program a chance to build data that better reflects Asia's diversity. The findings from Phase II of the program have shaped Singapore’s precision medicine efforts, including the implementation of a national genetic testing program for Familial Hypercholesterolemia, an inherited condition associated with an increased risk of premature heart disease. The JIC will work on the infrastructure challenge: storing, processing, and analyzing the data at Phase III scale, under specified governance requirements.

AWS has supported the national program since 2018. Running a national precision medicine program involves an ecosystem. Sequencing pipelines, quality control, secure research environments, and cost management all must work together under public sector rules.

This MoU takes the relationship from supplying cloud capacity to standing up a dedicated co-development program. A JIC gives PRECISE a dedicated technical counterpart at AWS so both teams can work through infrastructure decisions including data analysis and storage as the program grows.

What the PRECISE-Amazon Joint Innovation Center brings
The starting point is data sovereignty. Genomic data stays in Singapore, fully owned and controlled by PRECISE. AWS provides the cloud infrastructure but does not access, use, or retain participant data. For a program of this scale and sensitivity, separation is essential. With that foundation in place, the next challenge to address is volume. A single whole genome can create hundreds of gigabytes of data. At Phase III scale, that means managing and storing around 60 petabytes. Data needs also change over time: primary processing is intense but brief, while approved outputs need to stay accessible to authorized researchers. Scalability from the cloud lets the program match resources to what each stage requires.

Storing the data is one aspect, but making sense of it is another. Turning raw sequencing into useful results takes specialized, compute-heavy steps. Through the JIC, PRECISE, and AWS plan to evaluate how services such as AWS HealthOmics, AWS Batch, AWS Fargate, and Amazon EMR can work together. Not all genetic variations look the same, and no single tool can detect every type. The JIC will evaluate how different AWS cloud services can work together so PRECISE can use the right approach for each kind of analysis.

Crucially, none of this works without the right people in place. The demands of production genomics in the cloud require deep expertise in access control, auditing, and cost governance. By working directly alongside PRECISE, AWS helps strengthen local skills and build a durable bench of expertise for the life of the program.

What comes next
This collaboration gives Singapore's precision-medicine effort a cloud foundation built to run at national scale, and a pathway to keep improving it. PRECISE and AWS aim to develop solutions that can support its next phase, while creating datasets and tools that better reflect the many populations that make up Asia.

For researchers and institutions across Asia alike, the JIC could prove that a nation’s genomic diversity, when studied at scale, can reshape how an entire region understands health.