Case Study: South African National Bioinformatics Institute (SANBI) achieves rapid, accurate, scalable, and cost-effective HIV drug resistance testing with Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Cloud for HIV Drug Resistance Testing

Exatype, developed by Professor Simon Travers and his team at the South African National Bioinformatics Institute (UWC), is a cloud-based platform that provides rapid, affordable HIV drug-resistance analysis. The team faced the challenge of processing vast, complex next-generation sequencing data: local analysis required expensive hardware, constant software updates and support, and limited scalability and sensitivity—raising the cost and slowing turnaround for testing large populations.

By migrating analysis to AWS, Exatype ingests sequence files directly from sequencers and returns detailed genotype PDF reports within an hour, accurately distinguishing true mutations from background errors. The cloud solution cut analysis costs, enabled unlimited scalability (hundreds of tests per machine per day), improved sensitivity to detect low-prevalence resistance (<1%), and positioned the platform to expand to other microbial resistance testing and real-time surveillance.

South African National Bioinformatics Institute

Simon Travers

Professor