Vin Gupta’s hiring in January 2020 could not have come at a better time for Amazon. The extent of the coronavirus crisis wasn’t yet clear, but the company’s cloud division had just nabbed a practicing pulmonologist and public health expert to guide its strategy during the worst respiratory pandemic in global history.
The result is a growing enterprise within the company to help customers build diagnostic tools that may long outlast the pandemic, and help Amazon further expand its footprint in the $3.5 trillion health care industry.
Gupta told STAT the company is now proceeding with the next phase of its Diagnostic Development Initiative, a $20 million program to provide free computing power and expertise to develop products to test for Covid-19, predict disease severity, and track the spread of emerging variants. It is already working with some of the biggest names in medicine, including Stanford University, the genetic sequencing giant Illumina, and the genomics and Covid-19 testing company Helix.
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