With AWS, the leading genomic and diagnostic testing company performed more than 6 million COVID-19 tests globally during the pandemic, scaling daily testing capabilities by 8x
HONG KONG SAR – 14 December 2021 – Today, Amazon Web Services (“AWS”), an Amazon.com company, announced that Prenetics, a global leader in genomics and diagnostic testing, is running its entire infrastructure on AWS, the world’s leading cloud, to provide millions of consumers globally with at-home testing. Prenetics’ COVID-19 tests are approved and recognized by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and United Kingdom governments, and supported by many global organizations including the Hong Kong Standard Chartered Marathon, Hong Kong International Airport, London’s Heathrow Airport, Cathay Pacific Airways, Delta Air Lines, and the English Premier League (EPL). The breadth and depth of AWS’s cloud capabilities, including computing, developer tools, and databases, have enabled Prenetics to significantly scale its testing capabilities while also making the testing process faster, more efficient, and cost effective.
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread worldwide, people needed quick, accurate, and easily accessible testing to verify their health status, seek timely treatment, and prevent transmission. To meet this demand, Prenetics used the cloud to develop health solutions, including its COVID-19 testing services, that helped people navigate the pandemic safely. With AWS’s full suite of developer services including AWS CodeBuild, AWS CodePipeline, and AWS CodeDeploy, Prenetics has automated the building, testing, and deployment phases of application development, saving time for developers to focus on inventing new health products and features. For example, Prenetics developed Circle HealthPod, a portable, reusable, and rapid detection system that can test consumers for COVID-19 at home and at point-of-care locations, like hospitals, in approximately 20 minutes. Prenetics is developing single-use capsules for Circle HealthPod to detect other infectious diseases like influenza and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). To run these new tests and access the results, users simply use the Circle HealthPod’s mobile app, which also runs on AWS.
Using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) Auto Scaling, which enables organizations to automatically add or remove Amazon EC2 instances according to conditions they define, Prenetics automatically scales microservices for testing-related tasks, including user registration and test result processing. Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a service that helps customers set up, operate, and scale a relational database in the cloud, enables Prenetics to minimize database management time and focus on managing the testing process. To rapidly scale based on user demand for COVID-19 tests while remaining secure, Prenetics uses AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) to protect its web applications and application programming interfaces (APIs) against common web exploits and bots that try to compromise security or consume excessive infrastructure resources. In 2020, Prenetics set up a cloud infrastructure in four days to achieve data compliance and minimize latency in Europe by using AWS. Prenetics also built a digital health passport in ten days in the cloud for the English Premier League, allowing all 20 football clubs to conveniently and securely reveal their COVID-19 status to make training sessions and matches safer, bringing the excitement of the game back to fans worldwide.
“By tapping into AWS’s array of services and proven infrastructure, we accelerated COVID-19 testing with new innovations and easily expanded operations globally,” said Peter Wong, CTO of Prenetics. “We look forward to using AWS’s advanced cloud capabilities, including machine learning, to further support our international customers by providing the best healthcare services.”
“Organizations leading the charge in healthcare and life sciences use the cloud to help improve patient care, lower costs, and advance precision medicine,” said Robert Wang, Managing Director, Hong Kong and Taiwan, AWS. “The COVID-19 pandemic is spurring rapid innovation and transformation in the industry, and Prenetics is using the expertise and the breadth and depth of AWS’s secure, reliable, and scalable cloud capabilities to transform the testing experience for both patients and providers.”
About Amazon Web Services
For over 15 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud offering. AWS has been continually expanding its services to support virtually any cloud workload, and it now has more than 200 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, 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 81 Availability Zones within 25 geographic regions, with announced plans for 27 more Availability Zones and nine more AWS Regions in Australia, Canada, India, Indonesia, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Arab Emirates. 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.
