The contemporary software industry is evolving at a rapid pace as well as providing enormous benefits to virtually any industrial sector. Cloud Computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain technologies are enabling new capabilities, automating routine work, and providing the ability to improve quality, among many other things. All of these technological implementations and progressions are currently evident in the software development space. Looking from the precision medicine perspective, genetic testing technology, and infrastructure are also transforming quickly. Hospitals and healthcare organizations around the globe are building their own infrastructure to handle the increasing testing volume.
Founded in 1998, Golden Helix® is a global bioinformatics firm that develops and sells an industry leading clinical solution, supporting the analysis of sequencing data and creating clinical reports. Over the last five years, Golden Helix has developed a complete, end-to-end bioinformatics pipeline designed to receive data from the sequencer and then taking it to the final stage of clinical reporting. Alongside, the extensive team of Golden Helix has created automation capabilities for high-throughput labs and a comprehensive data warehousing solution that allows the capturing and querying of the entire lab output.
Talented & Intellectual Leader behind Golden Helix
Andreas Scherer is the CEO, board member and shareholder of Golden Helix, Inc. Andreas joined Golden Helix in 2013, with a goal to lead the company into the clinical analytics space, thereby leveraging its tremendous expertise and technical capabilities. Back then, Andreas and his team had understood that the whole market would grow beyond studying the correlation between genetic markers and diseases to the clinical application of this knowledge. Addressing these insights, Andreas developed new products to serve the evolving needs of his customers.
Currently, the multifaceted CEO focuses on developing a sound strategy for Golden Helix in the quickly changing market. More importantly, it is Andreas’s responsibility to ensure that his team is building the right products that deliver high on the yield curve for customers. He also provides strong oversight in operational areas such as sales & marketing, engineering, customer support and business operations.
Exclusive Array of Solutions & Services
- Secondary Analysis: It provides the unique ability to analyze genomic data in regards to Single Nucleotide Variationsand Structural Variations. Moreover, the secondary analysis also offers a high performing secondary pipeline that includes alignment and variant calling on par with GATK and MuTect2 at much-improved speed levels.
- Tertiary Analysis:In tertiary analysis, VarSeq, VSClinical, and VSReports are covering all the clinically relevant workflows for the filtering and annotating of genomic data in concordance with applicable guidelines such as the ACMG. Golden Helix also supports the analysis of gene panels, trios, single exome and whole genomes.
- Data Warehousing: The VSWarehousecaptures the artifacts of the bioinformatics pipeline. Via powerful APIs, the product connects to other lab and hospital systems such as EPIC or Cerner’s Millennium.
Leading the Industry Shift with Unique Services
Golden Helix’s complete software stack sets it apart from the other competitors in the existing marketplace. It is a significant advantage over any other software architecture, consisting of different point solutions of other commercial vendors or homegrown applications. This high degree of integration brings tremendous speed and performance advantages since Andreas, and his team has been able to optimize data formats as well as leverage multi-threaded code components across its various product lines.
The integrated software stack enables its clients to conduct a thorough analysis of their sample data that is coming out of the sequencer. It also supports the entire clinical interpretation and report generation. Lastly, it can store whole set of data, make it retrievable and allows other hospital systems to connect to the data repository via APIs and standard protocols.
Delivering Value Added Services to Clients
The team of Golden Helix ensures their customer success by providing extensive training and support as they feel that it is vital to troubleshooting any problems that their clinical and research clients face while conducting their work. As part of this process, Golden Helix has a robust procedure in place to capture new requirements that are being integrated into its developmental roadmap. This process is part of its continuous improvement efforts. New clients are benefiting from Golden Helix’s substantial customer base as well as the core team is receiving positive feedback on a global basis from their loyal customers. Meanwhile, Golden Helix is also working on disruptive solutions with game-changing capabilities like detection of copy number variations in Next-Gen Sequencing data.
Expanding Clientele Base
Since its inception, Golden Helix has accumulated a significant customer base of over 350 organizations globally, with thousands of users leveraging its analytics products. Additionally, its software has also been referenced in over 1,200 publications. Golden Helix customers fall into the following five primary categories.
- Testing labs: These customers are mainly using its clinical products such as VarSeq, VSReports, VSClinical, and VSWarehouse.
- Hospitals: Numerous clients’, who are operating their clinical testing labs, typically use VarSeq, VSReports, VSClinical, and VSWarehouse.
- Pharmaceutical companies: Golden Helix has many global pharmaceutical companies as customers, who mainly purchase its research product.
- Major research organizations: These are mainly US-based sizeable academic research centers and universities, who are widely adopting Golden Helix’s entire solution portfolio.
- Government organizations: Andreas and his team conduct business with different branches of the NIH and other parts of the US government.
Formulating the Future
It has been Golden Helix’s goal to provide the industry-leading platform for clinical decision making based on next-gen sequencing. Over the coming years, Andreas and his team will continue to focus strongly on the US and Canada market, however, after identifying tremendous opportunities, they are also planning to explore other international markets in Europe, Asia, and Australia.
