 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Online. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman. This is theCUBE's coverage of Amazon Web Service, Public Sector's online summit. Always love we have phenomenal practitioner discussion. Of course, Public Sector includes government agencies, universities, education, broad swath inside that ecosystem. And some really important and timely discussions we're having, of course, with the global pandemic, COVID-19 happening. I'm really happy to welcome to the program, Wei Li, who is a PhD and principal investigator, as well as an assistant professor, both Children's National Research Institute. It's associated with George Washington University. Wei, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thank you for the opportunity over here. All right, why don't we start with, give us a little bit of your research focus in general, and what projects it is that you're working on these days? Yeah, sure, so yeah, so hello everyone. So our laboratory is mainly interested in using computational biology and gene editing approaches to understand human genome and human disease. And we are particularly interested in one gene editing technology, what we call CRISPR screening. So this is a fascinating high-fruits pool technology because it tells you whether one of the 20,000 human genes are connected with some certain disease phenotype in one single experiment. So in the past, we developed some of the widely used algorithms to analyze the screening data. It has been downloaded by over 60,000 times, so it's really popular. And right now there are a couple of ongoing projects, but basically we are trying to, for example, performing machine learning and data mining approaches to find new clues of human disease from the regionomics and screening big data. And we also collaborated with a lot of labs around the world and to use this technology to find new cures and drugs for cancer and other diseases. So this is the basic overview of our current research programs. In terms of the COVID-19 research, I think one of the major projects we are having is that we noticed that CRISPR screening and other similar screening methods has been widely used in many years and in many research labs to study virus infection. So in the past 10 years, we have seen people are using the CRISPR screening and RAI screening, for example, to study HIV, Z-car, West Nile Virus, Ebola, Influenza, and also Coronavirus. So there is an interesting question from us if we collect all the screening data together for these viruses. What new information can we find that we cannot identify from a single study? For example, can we identify new patterns or new human genes that are commonly responsible for many different viruses types? Or we can find some genes that work only for some certain type of viruses. So moreover, we know that there are a lot of drugs to target different genes and we are particularly interested in, for example, can we repurpose some of these drugs to treat different type of viruses, including COVID-19. So that's one of the major purpose of the ongoing research project in our lab related to COVID-19. So in the end, we hope that we can find some new gene functions that are broadly essential for different type of viruses. I also, new drug targets that can potentially treat existing and new viruses, including COVID-19. Yeah, CRISPR has shown a lot of promise. It's definitely a lot of excitement in the research community to be able to work on this. You talked a little bit about big data, obviously, a lot of computational power required to do some of the things you're talking about. Can you speak a little bit to the partnership between computer science and the medicine? How do you make sure that there's that marrying of the people and the technology to focus in the medical space? Yeah, so I think my research background is actually from computer science. I got an undergrad and graduates from the computer science. So I know a lot about the computer science and algorithm, but right now it's quite interesting because our research focus half on computer science and half on the medicine. So it's a pretty hard experience, but it's really super, I would say, super exciting to connect both computer science and medicine together. So I think most of the time we are focusing on the coding and algorithm analysis. But at the same time, we also spend a lot of time on interpreting the results. In that sense, we need a lot of knowledge from biology and medicine to make sense, to make our results sense and interpretable. In the end, we hope that our results can be developed into some, for example, clinically actionable solutions, including new drugs. Yeah, if you think about the research space, often it's projects that you're taking months or years to investigate things. If we're talking about the current COVID-19 pandemic, of course, there's a critical need today for fast moving activities. So what are the outcomes from the COVID-19 aspects of what you're working on? What are some of the outcomes that we might be able to expect to help patient survivability and other things regarding this specific disease? Yeah, so I think there are two major, I would say there are two major benefits from the outcome of our research project. So the first thing is that we hope to find some genes that can be potentially drug targets. So if there are existing drugs that can target the genes, then that would be perfect because we don't need to do anything about this. We just need to try the existing drugs to target these genes. And in the end, we hope that these drugs can have the broad antiviral activity. That means that even if, for example, if these drugs can be potentially used to treat COVID-19 and sometimes in the, like several years later in the future, if there's a new virus coming out, hopefully we're doing like it's already the drugs that can target this new gene. Hopefully that's the new virus will never happen in something in the future, but we hope that when the new virus is coming, we already have the new drugs to target this. We already have existing drugs to target these viruses. So that's one part. And the other part is that we have like spent a lot of time to, for example, collecting the genomics and screening data. And we are hoping that our research results can be freely accessible around the world by many different researchers in different labs. So that's why we are relying on AWS to build up the, to process and to analyze the data as well as to build up an integrated database and the websites, such that the outcomes of our projects can be freely accessible around the world by many other researchers. Yeah, great. I'm glad you connected the dots for us for AWS. Can you speak a little bit to, you know, obviously cloud has, you know, the ability for us to use, you know, nearly infinite computational capabilities. But what's specific about AWS helps you along that project? Let's start there. Yeah, sure. I think AWS really helps us a lot because we developed an algorithm to process the screening data. It actually takes like two or three days to process one data. But if you, we are talking about like tens or even hundreds or even thousands of the screening data, the existing high performance clustering doesn't really help because it takes maybe years to finish. AWS provides like flexible computing resources, especially the EC2 instance that we can quickly deploy and process in relatively short amount of time. So our estimation is that we can reduce them amount of time needed to process, to process the public Christmas screening data from months to just a few days. So that's one part. And the other part is that we are trying to build up the website and database, as I mentioned before, which we can host a large amount of data and I think in that sense, AWS and their computing instance, as well as the AWS RDS service really helps us a lot because we don't need to worry too much about a lot of the details of the deployment of the database and the website. We just go ahead and use the AWS service. It's really straightforward and it saves us a lot of time and effort. Yeah, and you talk about the sharing of data information is so important, but of course we're talking about medical data highly regulated. So, what's the importance of the cloud to make sure that you can share with all the other researchers, yet still make sure that there's the security and compliance that is required? Yeah, so yeah, that's a really good question. So right now we don't really need to deal with the patient information because all the data we get is from the public domain and it's performed on the human cell lines, not on human patients. So we don't have the concerns about their privacy protections at this moment. But I think in the future, if we want to integrate genomics data with the screening data, which is already in my research plan, I think the highly secure AWS system actually really provide a really nice platform for us to do this job. Can you give us a little bit, look forward as to where do you see this research going? What applicability is there for what you're doing now? As this current pandemic plays out, as well as applicability beyond COVID-19? Yeah, sure. I think one of the major focus of our current COVID-19 project is that we hope to find some drug targets that have their broad and viral activity. So I think in the future, if there's a new virus coming out, which is similar to COVID-19, we hope that we are well prepared for that. I think in the future, data sharing as well as cloud computing will be becoming more and more important as you can see that most of us are working from home right now. So it's really critical to have the platform to accelerate the sharing between different research labs around the world. And I think many different, I think AWS provides this really nice platform for us to do this job. All right, well, Waley, thank you so much for sharing with our audience your updates and really important work. We wish your team the best of luck and hope that you also stay safe. Yeah, thank you so much. All right, stay with us for more coverage from AWS Public Sector Summit Online. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks as always for watching theCUBE.