Amazon Web Services (AWS) has pledged a $10m investment to boost research efforts in paediatric health care and enhance the understanding of rare diseases.

The initiative aims to empower non-profit institutions by allowing them to use the AWS Cloud platform to advance paediatric and children's causes worldwide.

It was announced recently at the AWS summit in Washington DC.

The funding will facilitate access to crucial research for a vulnerable patient demographic that often faces issues due to the limited availability of resources and small sample sizes.

It has been allocated to support a consortium of hospitals and institutions using Cloud computing and AI technologies to expedite research and discoveries.

AWS said that effective data management in the cloud will enable researchers to better comprehend disease genetics, leading to faster, more precise diagnoses and tailored treatments.

Around $3m of the total $10m will be shared between the Ohio-based Nationwide Children’s Hospital, the Children’s National Hospital in Washington, and the Children’s Brain Tumor Network at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP).

Each of these organisations will receive $1m to support their mission-driven work.

The remaining $7m will be provided to projects that aim to expedite paediatric research, advance maternal child health and empower the paediatric workforce and caregivers.

According to AWS, the funding effort will help in creating cloud-based data repositories as the initial step to facilitate the treatment of rare childhood diseases, while improving the efficiency of care delivery and personalising treatment plans.

CHOP Center for Data Driven Discovery in Biomedicine director Adam Resnick said: “We are so excited by the initiative that AWS is launching because it dovetails so perfectly into our narrative that despite being a rare disease, paediatric cancers truly provide a unique proving ground for new technology because of their dependency on real-time discovery and collaborative networks.”