Case Study: Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai achieves rapid, secure genomic data analysis with Amazon SES

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai - Customer Case Study

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai needed to mine and securely collaborate on more than 100 TB of TCGA breast and ovarian genomic data to find the missing hereditary links in patients who do not carry BRCA1/2 mutations. The project required massive, elastic compute and storage, strict access controls, and reliable user notifications; Amazon SES (used for outbound email notifications) was one of the AWS services adopted to meet those operational and security needs.

Station X built its GenePool platform on AWS—leveraging Amazon S3, EC2, EBS, IAM, SNS, Amazon SES, CloudWatch, ElastiCache and load balancing—to provide secure, scalable storage, compute, access control and alerts for Mount Sinai researchers. Using this AWS-based solution, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai can now rapidly mine thousands of TCGA records, answer analysis questions in minutes or seconds, and identify and enrich novel candidate genes for hereditary breast and ovarian cancers—results the team says would not have been possible without Amazon SES and the broader AWS/GenePool implementation.

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

John A. Martignetti

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai