The UK Biobank, the large-scale biomedical database and research resource, has received a £16 million boost to upgrade how it uses and stores its growing wealth of health data.

Announced today by the science and technology secretary Peter Kyle, Amazon Web Services (AWS) will provide $10 million—around £8m—worth of cloud computing credits to help ensure the bank has the cloud infrastructure it needs for its increasing mass of data.

As well as providing it with access to more data storage, it’ll also enable the bank to utilise AWS services and AI machine learning.

AWS’ contribution will be matched by an additional £8 million in government investment, and forms part of the public, private, and philanthropic group set up to keep the facility at the forefront of medical research.

Today’s news also means that almost £50 million in backing has now been achieved for the UK Biobank, putting fundraising efforts within touching distance of the funding goal which was set out last year.

The UK Biobank is the world’s most advanced source of data for health research, supporting the life sciences sector to transform healthcare for people across the UK and across the globe.

With in-depth genetic, health, and lifestyle information from half a million UK volunteers, researchers can apply to access the de-identified and secure data, using it to enable medical progress, such as developing tests for Alzheimer’s.

Its database is regularly augmented with new data, such as the recent addition of the largest-ever set of whole genome sequencing data, the largest ever proteomic dataset, and the on-going results of the world’s largest imaging study of whole-body scanning.

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Visiting UK Biobank today, the science secretary said: “UK Biobank is helping researchers around the world tackle some of the biggest health problems facing humanity – from dementia to heart disease – by putting an unprecedented scale of information at their fingertips.

“This research is helping us develop the treatments that will improve and hopefully prolong all our lives.

“This contribution from Amazon Web Services – matched by government – will mean that UK Biobank has the cloud infrastructure it needs, to underpin such a vast undertaking.

“This is just the start of our plan to work hand-in-hand with industry and academia, to harness the power of life sciences to grow our economy and boost healthcare.”

The last time DIGIT reported on the UK Biobank was in February this year, where the previous UK government provided it with £21m as part of biosector batch funding.

The investment was specifically provided for a new robotic freezer, used to store 20 million samples of biological data and support research that’s being done to treat diseases like dementia and Parkinson’s.