Building an ML-powered platform to bridge gaps in cancer care

Modus Create collaborated with a global biopharmaceutical leader to build a real-time cancer care platform powered by connected devices and patient data. The platform detects early warning signs, tracks symptoms, and helps deliver personalized treatment. Built on AWS and fully compliant with healthcare regulations, it brings together oncologists, data scientists, and care coordinators to deliver smarter, faster interventions.

Our work involved

• Risk and compliance assessment
• HIPAA-compliant, FDA-validated infrastructure on AWS
• ML model deployment with Amazon SageMaker
• Medical device integration using AWS IoT Core
• Encrypted patient data storage using Amazon RDS
• 24/7 monitoring and alerting through AWS CloudWatch
• Documentation and training

Impact

Cancer treatment has advanced rapidly, but cancer care delivery hasn’t kept pace. Patients still face fragmented support systems, unmonitored symptoms between visits, and delayed clinical decisions. These gaps can be fatal. Research suggests that every four-week delay in cancer treatment may increase mortality risk by up to 10%..

A global biopharmaceutical leader, operating in 125+ countries with over $12 billion in annual R&D investment, set out to change that. Known for its breakthroughs in oncology, neurology, and infectious disease, the company wanted to transform how cancer care is delivered, moving from reactive treatment to proactive, personalized intervention.

Challenge

Bridging the gaps in cancer treatment

The vision was bold: integrate wearable sensors, cloud analytics, and machine learning to provide continuous, personalized support for cancer patients. This meant that the company needed to create a secure, FDA-compliant platform that could:

• Seamless integration with medical devices and wearable sensors
• Real-time ingestion and processing of sensor data with millisecond latency
• Enterprise-grade ML models to detect early warning signs and personalize care
• End-to-end encryption and military-grade data protection
• 99.99% uptime and resilience in life-critical environments
• Full compliance with HIPAA and FDA regulations for medical software
• Meaningful clinical insights-filtering signal from noise

Equally important was the need to accelerate time-to-market in a competitive therapeutic landscape, while enabling their internal teams to own and scale the platform long-term. Therefore, the biopharma company teamed up with Modus Create to envision, deploy, and scale the platform.

Solution

A connected platform for real-time cancer care

To realize this vision, our team designed a multi-phase implementation strategy that balanced speed, security, and scalability.

1. Pre-deployment planning and risk assessment

Before writing a single line of code, Modus Create conducted a thorough pre-deployment phase. This included a deep risk assessment, compliance verification aligned with HIPAA and FDA guidelines, and architecture planning to ensure every technical decision supported clinical reliability and patient safety. This early phase helped the entire team align on architecture decisions and establish a clear line of communication from day one.

2. Building the infrastructure for real-time monitoring

The team then built a secure, cloud-native architecture powered by AWS IoT Core, enabling low-latency communication between wearable sensors, medical devices, and cloud-based analytics. This allowed for continuous symptom tracking and remote monitoring, reducing unnecessary hospital visits while giving clinicians access to real-time patient data.

The platform’s sophisticated device management capabilities ensured reliable connectivity across diverse medical hardware ecosystems.

3. Enabling advanced diagnostics with machine learning

Amazon SageMaker provided us with the foundation to create advanced machine learning models and enable automated anomaly detection in health metrics. This advanced diagnostic capability empowered healthcare teams to predict adverse events before clinical manifestation and develop highly personalized treatment recommendations based on individual patient data patterns rather than population averages.

4. Engineering for security, compliance, and resilience

When it comes to developing healthcare platforms, it’s not enough to simply build the features; you also have to adhere to stringent compliance and regulatory requirements.

• For mission-critical data management, we used Amazon RDS to deliver HIPAA-eligible, encrypted storage of patient records and device data, ensuring compliance with stringent healthcare privacy regulations.
• Simultaneously, AWS CloudWatch helped us set up a comprehensive monitoring of IoT device performance and system health, providing administrators with real-time visibility into platform operations.

The full architecture underwent rigorous validation to ensure compliance with FDA software standards, safeguarding both patient safety and clinical efficacy.

5. Post-launch support and training

Following the launch, Modus Create provided comprehensive knowledge transfer to the biopharma firm’s internal teams, enabling them to manage and evolve the platform independently. The engagement also included 24/7 operational support, continuous security monitoring, and iterative performance optimization to support rapid user adoption and scaling.

Impact

Improved patient outcomes

The AWS-powered platform has enabled the biopharma company to redefine how cancer care is delivered-shifting from reactive treatment to proactive, data-informed intervention. The new platform led to:

• 42% increase in patient engagement, driven by continuous monitoring and personalized insights
• 27% reduction in unplanned hospital visits, thanks to early symptom detection
• 94% faster clinical decision-making, compressing cycles from days to minutes
• 38% improvement in treatment adherence, enabled by timely interventions
• 31% boost in overall patient outcomes during the initial deployment phase

But the transformation went beyond metrics. The platform’s scalable architecture brought together over 30 cross-functional specialists-oncologists, data scientists, and care coordinators-within a single connected system. This enabled a level of collaboration and care precision previously unattainable in oncology.