AWS Summit DC 2026 | Dr. Rowland Illing, AWS & Kerri Hill-Cawthorne, Fleming Initiative

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More from AWS Summit DC 2026

Dr. Rowland Illing

Chief Medical Officer and Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences

AWS

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

Senior Progamme Manager

Fleming Initiative

play_circle_outline Fleming Initiative partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust

play_circle_outline AWS Backs Fleming Initiative: Imperial College and NHS Trust Receive Multi‑Million Cloud Credits for Storage, Compute and AI

play_circle_outline AWS to provide cloud compute and storage credits worth several million dollars

play_circle_outline Combating Antimicrobial Resistance with Cloud-Connected Point-of-Care Diagnostics and Global Surveillance

play_circle_outline Cloud-connected point-of-care diagnostics for scalable field surveillance and data collection

play_circle_outline Connecting National Surveillance Systems and Global Health Data to Democratize Medical Expertise via Cloud Biobanks

play_circle_outline Blueprint for Interoperable Global Surveillance: Fleming and AWS Commit to Science-Driven Policy, Behavior Change, $90M Equity

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Dr. Rowland Illing, AWS & Kerri Hill-Cawthorne, Fleming Initiative

Dr. Rowland Illing

Chief Medical Officer and Director, Healthcare & Life Sciences AWS

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

Senior Progamme Manager Fleming Initiative

In this interview from AWS Summit Washington, D.C. 2026, Rowland Illing, global chief medical officer and director of healthcare and life sciences at Amazon Web Services, joins Kerri Hill-Cawthorne, senior program manager at the Fleming Initiative, to talk with theCUBE + NYSE Wired's Gemma Allen about how cloud and AI are accelerating the fight against antimicrobial resistance. The Fleming Initiative — a partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust — connects patients, clinicians, researchers and policymakers to find tangible ... Read more

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What is the Fleming Initiative? add

What is the Fleming Initiative, and what support did AWS recently announce for it, including how AWS technology will be used? add

What are you and your collaborators working on, and how are you using AWS technology to support or advance that work? add

What approaches is the Fleming Initiative using to slow down or stop antimicrobial resistance? add

What approaches is the Fleming Initiative using to find solutions to slow down or stop antimicrobial resistance? add

How can cloud-based technologies and global biobanks be used to democratize medical expertise, integrate fragmented health and surveillance data worldwide, and accelerate global health research and drug discovery for initiatives like the Fleming Initiative? add

How does the Fleming Initiative prioritize which problems to tackle and decide its roadmap—what criteria guide that prioritization, and are there any low-hanging opportunities? add

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Dr. Rowland Illing, AWS & Kerri Hill-Cawthorne, Fleming Initiative

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Gemma Allen

>> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here on the ground in Washington DC for AWS Summit 2026. We are bringing all the conversations across this next paradigm shift for AWS and public sector and government. Joining me now for a conversation around healthcare, one of the most hopeful and promising areas in this world of AI is Dr. Rowland Illing from AWS and Kerri Hill-Cawthorne from the Fleming Initiative. Welcome, guys.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Thank you very much.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Thank you very much.

Gemma Allen

>> So let's start with the Fleming Initiative. It's a fascinating space, a fascinating history, but just start us off, Kerri. Fill us in. What exactly is it?

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Absolutely. The Fleming Initiative is a partnership between Imperial College London and the Imperial Healthcare NHS Trust. It is an organization that is not just about doing research at college. It's about linking patients, communities, researchers, clinicians, policymakers in order to find real tangible solutions to antimicrobial resistance.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Okay. And you guys had some interesting news this week in terms of what you are developing with huge opportunity and impact. Maybe if you could talk to us, Dr. Rowland, about what you guys are working on together and how you're using, I guess, AWS technology to bring some of these opportunities to life?

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah, it was great. We had an announcement yesterday at the keynote, in fact, where it was announced that AWS is going to be supporting the Fleming Initiative over the next few years. We're actually going to be providing credit. So cloud computing credits that'll go towards data storage and using compute to do AI. We'll give several million dollars towards the Fleming Initiative over the next few years as the program grows. And we're going to be working very closely to really make sure that the Fleming Initiative gets what it needs for its mission.

Gemma Allen

>> So talk me through micro ... You're going to have to say it for me.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Antimicrobial resistance.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm not even going to try.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> AMR.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> AMR.

Gemma Allen

>> AMR. AMR. Explain to me exactly what that is.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Absolutely. So it's when pathogens are no longer susceptible to the antibiotics or antifungals that you're prescribed essentially. It's not just in humans, it's animals as well, as well as the environment. Yeah. So essentially the drugs no longer work. You go to your doctor and you get medication for a bacterial infection and it doesn't work anymore. This is gradually rising globally, particularly in the Global South, it's a massive issue and there's a lot of contributing factors and a lot of things that really need doing to support the fight against that.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> And there are lots of types of microbes.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Yes.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> So it's all antimicrobial resistance, basically the microbes can be bacteria, funguses, viruses. The commonest ones probably is bacteria. They talk about a lot of people may have come across MRSA as a super bug.

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Yeah.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> And the reason why it's a super bug is because the common antibiotics no longer work.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> And that's because over all of the years antibiotics have been used. And the Fleming Initiative being the hundred-year anniversary of Fleming's discovery of penicillin, a new initiative needs to be launched to try and what's the next generation of cures that are going to come out to treat these very dangerous organisms.

Gemma Allen

>> It's fascinating because if you think about it, society's evolved, human behaviors, patterns have evolved and we need to ensure the tech evolves and the medicine evolves to meet some of those decisions and lifestyles that we live, right?

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> When we think about that kind of tech unlock from the perspective of the Fleming Initiative specifically, you mentioned people with lots of different skill sets there, right? Like people with very neat areas of focus that perhaps 10, 15 years ago weren't able to connect and integrate their knowledge the way they can now. Talk about how that's changing, like how you guys are using technology and I guess AWS in particular-

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Yeah, absolutely.

Gemma Allen

>> ... to bring that to life.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> So again, at the Fleming Initiative, there are so many different ways in which we are trying to find solutions to slow down or stop antimicrobial resistance. Some of those ways are, for example, building and designing new technologies. So point of care technologies that basically need to be deployable at scale in a global world, but that need to be cloud connected to be able to then understand the surveillance. So essentially you're out in the field anywhere in the world, you're in a local rural village. You need to understand the sort of infections that are passing across different populations, but you need to be connected to the cloud to do that. That's one example of using technology. There's also drug discovery, so looking for new antimicrobial agents. In that we've got tens of thousands of compound libraries where the use of AI to really detect sort of new targets for antimicrobial drugs is another area.

Gemma Allen

>> So I had a friend recently say to me when we think about the opportunity for AI in healthcare, if you think about, sometimes I live in New York and people fly to New York to meet the best doctors, right? She's like, what if you could build a digital twin of that doctor and the world could have access, right? So the opportunity is pretty immense, but there are steps that need to happen to get there and healthcare needs investment and needs recursive learning, all of the things that you just described. Talk to me, Dr. Rowland, about how you think about that. How far away are we from truly realizing huge value in medicine because of AI, because of technology? What do you imagine is possible 10 years from now?

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> I guess to summarize, it's really about democratization of expertise everywhere around the world. So as you say, a lot of people will go to certain places to see the expert. If we can scale that expertise everywhere, that will be really transformative for the global health. And so the kind of technology that we're working with the Fleming Initiative on is similar technology to ... We're working with a lot of global biobanks. So countries want to store their country's healthcare data from genomic sequencing to imaging scans to medical records. So we're working with countries like the UK, UK Biobank, the Broad in the U.S., PRECISE, which is the genome program for Singapore.So AWS already underpins a lot of very highly important national data sets in a very secure way and being able to scale that kind of research to researchers around the world. And so that's some of the technology that we'll be able to bring to bear for the Fleming Institute to answer some of those really difficult questions that were just being talked about around the fragmentation of information. Most countries have surveillance systems in place already, but the surveillance systems don't talk to each other. So how can we think about bringing those data together? How can we think about bringing those discoveries that are going on in isolated research environments together? And imagine having one platform where researchers from all around the world can share the knowledge they're bringing. It'll just accelerate the whole process of new drug discovery and even repurposing some old drugs that may be suitable for treatment as well.

Gemma Allen

>> So when we think about the Fleming Initiative and some of the folks and the great minds behind this, I'm sure there's a lot of academics, right? One thing that's interesting in healthcare is it really becomes a mass impact or a mass interest once it's commercialized.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> I think the speed at which we have to commercialize things now in this era we're in is obviously also rapidly accelerating. How do you guys think about that from the perspective of even your own marketing, Kerri, like your own go to market per se with partnerships with companies like Amazon?

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> I mean, without partners like Amazon, it's very difficult. I mean, route to market, especially from an academic lens can be really tricky. And actually that is often where you develop these amazing technologies, but actually the regulations involved to get them to market, to get them to bedside, to get them out in the field, it's incredibly difficult. So I think a partnership is just what we need to start accelerating that and also to scale, again, not just at your local NHS trust, to scale this nationally, to scale this globally, I think.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> You mentioned regulation a lot-

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> I'm just going to jump in.

Gemma Allen

>> Yeah. Sure.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Before we go there, I was just going to say, I think I wouldn't think about ... Even though AWS is the largest global technology provider for AI and machine learning everywhere, I don't want the Fleming Initiative to think of AWS just as technology provider. We have these relationships all around the world. So 19 of the top 20 global pharmaceutical companies are using AWS for their drug discovery. We're already working with the regulatory agencies like the FDA, European Medicines Agencies about how to speed up the process of drug approvals. And then on the provider side, we're working with national governments and hospital systems and research organizations actually platforming their clinical data. So hopefully AWS can act as some glue across the world to help the Fleming Initiative really scale fast.

Gemma Allen

>> So let's talk about that global impact, global thinking, but also global execution, right? You're European, you're British. You used to be European, now you're British again.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> But I do live in Washington DC.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Irish. You live in the UK. We know that there's variations in how things get rolled out, things get deployed, regulation varies geo to geo. Europe and the U.S. seems to be on somewhat of a different track in terms of speed to market, et cetera. How do you think about this from the perspective of AWS and some of what you're building that has huge global synergy, global impact? What are you seeing in way of being able to actually roll out things unilaterally across some of your geos?

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah. I think that the principles behind the management of healthcare and life science and data are the same everywhere around the world. The first thing is security. It's just got to be very secure and then it's also got to be highly scalable and also the business continuity aspect. If you're running clinical systems that are life sensitive, you've got to make sure they work. And I think that's why a lot of the healthcare and life sciences organizations choose AWS because we're the most secure platform and we've proven that for not just healthcare and life sciences workloads, but national security and defense for global banking. There's many, many industries that are choosing us because of those capabilities that we bring. Now, obviously when it goes to country by country, there are regulatory issues in every country that we work with. So we work with, in the Europe, we have GDPR compliance and we work with organizations to bring in the local regulatory frameworks. We work with those teams to make sure that the things that we're building are relevant to the countries of choice.

Gemma Allen

>> Kerri, at the Fleming Initiative, there are so many problems we could solve in this world, right?

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Yeah.

Gemma Allen

>> There is a list miles long of things even I could personally think of.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Right.

Gemma Allen

>> How do you guys prioritize? How do you think about your own roadmap, things that you're going to focus on? Are there particular criteria or even like low-hanging fruit? Dare I ask.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> No, of course. There is low-hanging fruit. I must say we do focus on science and innovation. We focus on informed policy and we focus on behavior change. Those are our three pillars of the Fleming Initiative. And I think underlying that, data underlines all of that. One of our big focuses at the moment, there's been a paucity of funding for global surveillance systems. So being able to track AMR, again, how it spreads across the world. There's been recent funding dropped from that, but there's such a big opportunity. As you've said, each country has their own surveillance system. They have their own things in place, but it's about linking all of those together. How can we learn from one another and how can we use tools, products to turn all of the data that exists into action and how to prevent the next pandemic, how to prevent diseases. It's not just about AMR. I mean, AMR is certainly a buzzword in lots of circles, but it's about preventing infection and it's about better healthcare for everyone. I mean, if we know what's coming, we can prevent against it and using the massive infrastructure and across us, I think.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah. And we actually launched ... So six years ago we launched the Health Equity Initiative in AWS. In actual fact, we've actually given $90 million to programs around the world that address issues of health equity and antimicrobial resistance, as you said, is a real problem in low and middle-income countries in particular where the use of antibiotics has been very strong. And so I'd love to see more programs built on top of the Fleming Initiative going on around the world, also powered by the Health Equity Initiative.

Gemma Allen

>> So your title, chief medical officer at AWS, that sounds like a very big title, a lot of scope and I'm sure there's a lot of companies, initiatives, NGOs that would love to partner with you guys and get access to some of what you have to offer. How do you prioritize? How do you guys think about the opportunity? Where do you even personally decide on spending your own time professionally?

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah. So we are the same as Amazon and AWS in terms of the way that we work with customers and are customer obsessed. So we work back from the needs of our end customers. So we talk to health systems, national governments, ministries of health, as well as the medical technology companies and life science companies and say, what are their biggest challenges? And what we build against those challenges and we support them with the technology that they need. So for example, last year we launched Amazon Bio Discovery, which is actually, you can think of it as a harness that you use biological foundation models with. So this new generation of not large language models for like English language, you actually have biological language, actually the language of proteins and the language of genetics. And so been a lot of foundation models, you may have heard of AlphaFold and the ability to build molecules. We actually launched this Amazon Bio Discovery, which actually allows over 40 different biological foundation models to be harnessed in order to speed drug discovery and drug creation and then a link to the laboratory to actually build them in real life and then with the results of that to be fed back into the models to enrich them.

Gemma Allen

>> It's fully recursive?

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah. So that Amazon Bio Discovery build in particular was something we built on behalf of our life science customers who want to speed that drug discovery process. And hopefully with this library that the Fleming Institute is going to bring along 100,000 molecules in the library saying these may be potential new treatments for antibiotics. I can't wait to see what that synergy looks like.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Well, it's certainly hugely important to work. What's ahead? So you guys had this announcement.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Yes. .

Gemma Allen

>> What does that look like? What's the timeline, the roadmap for this and what does the next six to 12 months look like for this relationship?

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Oh, definitely we've already had a couple of vision meetings. Again, you ask and I love that AWS asks, what does the next 10 years look like? It's not what the next 12 months looks like. What is the vision and how are we then going to get there? I think it's really about defining those actionable steps to get to the vision that we've been defining about supporting the work.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Yeah.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> So it's very exciting.

Gemma Allen

>> Wow. Well, guys, we look forward to hearing the updates. Hopefully we'll be back here next year and we'll hear about the many successes. As a mom, myself with little kids, I hope you're successful. Thank you so much for joining us in theCUBE.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Perfect.

Kerri Hill-Cawthorne

>> Thanks very much.

Dr. Rowland Illing

>> Thank you very much.

Gemma Allen

>> I'm Gemma Allen. We are here with theCUBE live on the ground at the AWS Summit in Washington DC. We have some great conversations coming up. Hot day, but energy is still high. Don't go anywhere.