Lyell Immunopharma Goes All-In on AWS as its Cloud Provider

Cellular therapy company seeks to accelerate research of cell-based immunotherapies for cancer and other diseases by relying upon AWS’s unmatched portfolio of cloud services

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Lyell Immunopharma is going all-in on AWS—running its cloud infrastructure on AWS—and has selected AWS as its standard for machine learning (ML) workloads. Lyell leverages AWS’s highly performant and scalable infrastructure to run its secure data and analytics platform as well as support its high-performance computing workloads to accelerate the research of new cell therapies as it searches for cures for cancer.

AWS’s breadth and depth of services is helping Lyell to uncover insights in scientific data on how the immune system can fight cancer, as well as speed up its research. One of Lyell's approaches to developing immunotherapies is using high performance computing (HPC) clusters to help scientists design new protein structures to engineer immune cells that are more capable of fighting cancer. Using AWS’s secure and elastic compute capacity, Lyell is able to design and test potential new cell therapy constructs at a faster rate, going from conducting a single simulation in four weeks to completing 30 simulations in 10 hours. By building a data lake on Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), and leveraging AWS analytics services such as Amazon Athena and Amazon EMR, Lyell can now analyze petabytes of research, clinical, and manufacturing data to gain insights into immune cell functionality faster than ever before. Lyell is also using Amazon SageMaker to enable scientists to build, train, and deploy ML models. These models enable automated image analysis and optimization of protein structures, which will facilitate Lyell’s mission to cure 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. “Our prominent team of scientists are now equipped to gain better research insights faster. AWS gives us the ability to scale quickly while meeting security and compliance requirements, which is essential to accomplishing our goal of creating a new generation of cell-based therapies 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,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “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. We’re excited to continue our work with Lyell as they innovate to deliver promising new therapies to treat cancer.”

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. To learn more about AWS, visit aws.amazon.com.

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About Lyell Immunopharma

Lyell is addressing the unsolved problem of creating reliable, curative adoptive cell therapy for solid tumors. Lyell brings together an unrivalled scientific team with a collection of novel technologies aimed at tackling the three barriers to this unsolved challenge:

• Redefining the starting cell preparations for cell-based immunotherapy by taking a cell-and developmental-biology approach, following the decades-long work of two Lyell scientific leaders, Stan Riddell and Nick Restifo
• Modulating T cells to maintain their functionality within the solid tumor microenvironment, with special attention to preventing, controlling and reversing the differentiation of T cells into dysfunctional states within solid tumors
• Controlling the specificity and safety of solid tumor-directed T cells armed with TCRs, CARs or other targeting modalities using state-of-the-art protein engineering

These three goals define the scientific triad of approaches that we believe will overcome the functional barriers to reliable and successful curative therapies. While we are focused on autologous T cells, we believe that we are developing technologies that will be useful to cell therapies broadly, potentially including allogeneic approaches. For further information please visit www.lyell.com or follow us on LinkedIn.